Living Beyond Breast Cancer:: A Survivor's Guide for When Treatment Ends and the Rest of Your Life Begins

Book by Weiss Marisa

Table of Contents
Acknowledgments        

Introduction: Living Beyond Breast Cancer        

Part One: Treatment Over, On with Your Life        
1. Over, Not Over        
2. Support Groups        

Part Two: Additional Care Beyond Treatment                
3. You and Your Doctors: Continuing Care                
4. You and Other Health Professionals                
5. Tests: Peer, Poke, Prod                                
6. After Mastectomy: Re-creating a Breast--With or Without Surgery                        
7. Tamoxifen Therapy: Is It for You?                

Part Three: Coping with Lingering Side Effects of Treatment        
8. Fatigue and Loss of Energy                                
9. Hair Loss: Terrible but Temporary                        
10. Arm Lymphedema: Prevention and Management                
11. Other Lingering Side Effects of Treatment                

Part Four: Caring For Your New Self                                
12. Intimacy, Sex, and Your Love Life                        
13. Eating Right for Recovery and Beyond                        
14. Weight Control                                                
15. Boosting Your Immune System                                
16. Breast and Chest Wall Self-Examination                        
17. A Child in Your Future? Fertility, Pregnancy, Adoption        
18. Menopause and Growing Older                                
19. Alternative and Complementary Therapies                

Part Five: The Threat Of Recurrence                        
20. Can You Live Cancer Free?                        
21. Recurrence: When Cancer Comes Back                
22. Living with and Managing Metastatic Cancer        
23. Understanding and Controlling Pain                
24. Hospice                                                
25. Endings                                                

Part Six: Employment, Insurance, And Wills        
26. Job Issues and Health Insurance                        
27. Wills for Living and the End of Life                

Part Seven: Hope On The Horizon                        
28. Understanding the Breast Cancer Genes                
29. New Treatment Breakthroughs in Sight                
30. Don't Let Breast Cancer Define You                
31. Conclusion: Turning "Why Me?" into "Why Anybody?"                                        

Appendix: Arm and Shoulder Exercises                

Helpful Organizations                                        

Selected Readings                                        

Living Beyond Breast CancerSM Membership Form        

Index        

Introduction:

Living Beyond Breast Cancer

Over 2 million women in the United States are living with breast cancer. One in eight women is at risk. Each year, over 200,000 cases are diagnosed.* If you've had breast cancer, you probably know these numbers by heart. With the progress we are seeing in early detection and the increasingly effective treatment of breast cancer, more women are surviving longer. More and more women are now living beyond breast cancer.

I am a physician specializing in breast cancer treatment, and I have the privilege of taking care of some of the women who make up these numbers. It wasn't long after I started treating women with breast cancer, over ten years ago, that I realized patients who had finished treatment continued to feel distressed. Instead of feeling thrilled to have the breast cancer experience behind them, they were uneasy, sometimes anxious. What do I do now? Am I really cured? Is it safe for me to get pregnant? Can I take hormones? Will my daughter get breast cancer? What should I tell the man I've just met? Will my cancer diagnosis affect my ability to get health insurance? My patients desperately wanted an intelligent, in-depth response to their questions as they moved from "I have breast cancer" back to "I am leading a normal life."

I found myself saying over and over, "We don't have good answers to your questions." I'm a hands-on, can-do person, and it was enormously frustrating to me to leave my patients dissatisfied and fumbling about for answers to these vital questions. I felt I had to do something to tackle this astonishing void of information.

The whole point of early detection and effective treatment of breast cancer is to provide long life, and good quality of life, after treatment is over. Support and education are crucial parts of your care; you need them to nurture and sustain your physical, emotional, and financial health. I decided the most effective way to help my patients was to create educational conferences designed for their needs-not unlike the kinds of conferences physicians organize to keep up to date and informed-with seminars featuring expert speakers, panel discussions, and small group workshops where women could ask the experts the questions on their minds, and where we could hope for answers from those at the cutting edge of new work. So, in 1992, the organization Living Beyond Breast CancerSM was born in the spare room on the third floor of my busy and overcrowded home.

To date, we've had nearly two dozen conferences in the Philadelphia area, with attendance close t...