Jen, who writes at The Dinoia Family, offers some strong personal arguments in favor of breast reconstruction.  She argues effectively against those who might suggest that such surgery is arbitrary and needless

Last summer my neighbor and good friend was diagnosed with triple negative breast cancer.  She decided to be treated at the community hospital where I worked for 20 years.  So I knew all of her doctors and many of the nurses and technicians caring for her.  Chris does in home daycare.  So I most often see her in the summer when my granddaughters are spending a lot of time at our house.  We would always walk down when the kids were playing in the driveway.  My girls would bring their bikes or scooters, toys, dolls, and cookies to share.  We would sit in the driveway and watch the kids, exchanging news and neighborhood gossip.  She and her husband are self-employed so they had less than optimal healthcare options, part of the forgotten America the healthcare reform bill was meant to serve.

Chris started a Caringbridge page in addition to her Facebook updates.  When I read her January post, I felt I had to republish it here.  Like so many of us making a year’s end assessment, she has focused on the blessings as much as the suffering that cancer brings.

New Year, new me

Hello everyone,

I have never been so glad to see a year end !  2012 Will be a new year with new beginnings for me.  I finished all of my treatments just before Christmas.  It was a perfect time to wrap treatments up.  After  12 weeks of chemo and 36 radiation treatments I am finally finished.

My Oncologist said they have surgically removed, poisoned (chemo) and burned (radiation) every cancer cell that they could.  I am considered in remission.

It is frustrating  though because with Triple Negative Breast cancer that even though it is the worst kind of breast cancer, very aggressive ,there are no blood tests or other test  to prove it is all gone.  The treatments are like an insurance policy they tell me.policy.

They cautioned me that most women experience depression when treatment ends. I however refuse to let myself go there. I do feel somewhat anxious now that the heavy duty treatments have ended and I am somewhat on my own.  Will it come back ? What do I fight it with currently ?

I know I have a wonderful support system to rely on and now that treatments are over. Also I plan to rely on my spiritual side to continue to help me stay strong. I have felt empowered by all of you with your kindness and prayers. My niece pointed out that it is like everything I have ever done for anyone has come full circle back to me. That is very true. It has been overwhelming all the love I have felt.  I could never have imagined how kind everyone would be !!

I can honestly say that more good has come from the last 7 months than bad.  I have seen many other patients in much worse shape than myself and it made me feel like one of the lucky ones if there is such a thing with cancer. Lucky  however I did not have cancer when my sons were young, the situation my late Mother had to endure.

There were so many rules to follow during treatment that I now feel free at last. Free to try to return to normal. For example free to eat blueberries and other antioxidants once again.  Free to take supplements, free to wear a bra !  Free to use a regular toothbrush because there are no more blisters in my mouth from chemo,Free to wear a deodorant that might contain aluminum…even though the aluminum is not good for any of us.Free not to force myself to consume 64 oz of water, free to drink WHATEVER I want like wine  AND free to watch my hair slowly growing in now. Free to have my hair colored again, that is as soon as I grow enough to color !  Did I really expect it to grow in blonde ?? I have never seen myself any other way.

I see one of my 3 oncologists  in 2 weeks and I will continue to be watched closely for a while but basically the worst is behind me.

In fact the day I “graduated”, they even gave me a diploma, from radiation my husband Tom went out and bough me some graduation presents ! Some beautiful Susan Komen Breast cancer jewelry that are now dear to my heart.

Speaking of hearts…I am so happy to mention that Tom is also doing very well after his Open Heart Surgery.  What a pair we are.

His surgeon said that people often die from what he had and it was  a very serious situation. Dr Storey said it is a very slow recovery, 3 months, but Tom is doing very well.

We are both truly  blessed to have such good outcomes from such a scary time. A new year and renewed health for both of us !

Again, Thank you so much for your support !

Here is another more positive outlook for the new year.  It is written by a professional writer and lymphoma survivor blogging at OPEN Mike

For more than three years now I have sumo wrestled with the Emperor of all Maladies, each of us trying to throw the other out of the ring. (At 145 pounds I may be in the wrong sport but, hey, I’m feisty.) Our next honbasho starts on Jan. 12.

Here are five things I’ve learned about my foe:

Cancer is an accumulation of accidental cellular events that conspire to take down the whole system, slowly building momentum over the years until it reaches a tipping point and then cascades out of control toward the grave.

Cancer can take decades to mature, during which the initial mutation is augmented by other random genetic changes, fueled by carcinogens in our food and environment and super-charged by stress.

Cancer is born in, and borne along by, the genes, as Dr. Mukherjee points out: “Abnormal genes governed all aspects of cancer’s behavior. Cascades of aberrant signals, originating in mutated genes, fanned out within the cancer cell, promoting survival, accelerating growth, enabling mobility, recruiting blood vessels, enhancing nourishment, drawing oxygen—sustaining cancer’s life.”

Cancer hijacks the body’s normal processes to its own narcissistic ends. There’s nothing extraneous about cancer. It doesn’t invent new proteins or pathways but exploits existing ones, like mitosis and motility, while overriding built-in safeguards like apoptosis and tumor-suppressor genes.

Cancer has vulnerabilities; it can be beaten—or at least beaten back for several years—by a combination of healthy habits and medical treatments. My seven-fold strategy includes: a positive attitude, a sense of humor, a plant-based diet, targeted intervention (surgery, radiation, chemotherapy), submissive prayer, a focus on others, and the loving support of family and friends.

My tenth cancerversary came and went almost without notice.  I would feel bad about this oversight but maybe it is a sign of good mental health, of having moved on.  It was 2001, a year that is remembered darkly anyway for the events of that September.

It was a series of events in my case, each one more portentous than the one preceding.  I awoke with a start – a stabbing pain in more lower left abdomen.  Then reaching down to feel a large hardened shape that hadn’t been there before.  Having a physician colleague palpate the mass when I went to work at the hospital.  Being told “you need a CAT scan.  I mean today!” So I went to my own primary care doctor.  He also felt the mass, ordering a scan and a reading STAT.  So I had it done, returning the next day to pick up the results and ferry them back to my doctor’s.  It was a rare sunny, balmy day in early December, the kind that fills you with optimism.  That lasted until the typed results slipped out of the envelope in the car, revealing the words “leukemia or lymphoma.”

Life was never the same after that.  Becoming cancer.  Achieving remission.  Falling back into relapse.  Second remission followed by stem cell transplant.  The operative word in this paragraph is life. I still have it.

Here I am ten years later, much longer than the 7.5 months predicted in the literature.  A miraculous testament to the theory of targeted biotherapy.  A poster child for my own rare disease – t-cell prolymphocytic leukemia.

So I let the anniversary slip by me unnoticed.  Maybe I want to forget that cold, cold day when I first read my prognosis, and crouched in the shower crying for my last Christmas season, crying for the for the family weddings I would never witness, for the unborn grandchildren I would never hold.

I do still celebrate, although quietly, as many transplant survivors do, the anniversary of my stem cell transplant, the birth of my renewed immune system, and hence my new “birthday.”  August 16th – now that’s a day to remember, although I don’t, remember much of it, that is.  The preparatory chemo made me weak.  In the morning, at home, I collapsed to my knees in the bathroom.  My wife and teenage son had to help me back to my feet and into the bedroom.  My wife drove me to the clinic.  Before the infusion of my donor/brother’s stem cells, I received 50 mg of Benadryl intravenously.  That’s about the last I remember of the procedure.  Photographs exist that prove that it happened.  But then I still exist which should be proof enough.

My wife drove me to University Hospital for admission to the Bone Marrow Transplant unit, the place where I now work.  Although it was August, for some reason I remember it as being cold.  The rest of my twenty-two day stay is a cloudy, episodic mixture in memory.  My wife kept notes of each day’s events on our Caringbridge page.  Someday I will reread them, then set them on virtual paper in narrative form, the next chapter in my Diary of an Illness, for others to read.  Perhaps then my memory will be restored.

I am grateful, immensely grateful, to have survived, to continue surviving when I know of others not so lucky, people with my own disease, people with other types of cancer.  Cancer once again provides me with a font of new relationships weekly.  Most of the new people I meet are folks with cancer or those affected by cancer – the wives, husbands, sons, daughters, mothers and fathers that stream through are clinic, not knowing exactly what to do but trying to do the best they can.  Just being there…sometimes that is enough.  Which is good because sometimes just being there is all that can be done.

I am grateful but sometimes I think not grateful enough.  One of the first lessons a cancer patient learns (right after the lesson that life is not at all fair) is to cherish time, to cherish relationships.  We sometimes adapt the conviction that this is a lesson which will change us forever, change the way we relate to the world. We promise ourselves never to forget these lessons, never to fall back into a lazy, unfocused approach to life.

But then time passes.  For the lucky years pass.  We get further and further from the drama of our illness.  We fervently hope for a return to normalcy.  I think we never quite get there.  We are not as close to death as we were when we were ill.  But we are closer than before we were sick, before we were cancer.

For survivorship to be meaningful is has to require a certain level of enduring responsibility.  So much was suffered by us, so much by the people that loved us.  For the time of our illness immense resources were directed towards – the finest fruits of medical science were laid at out feet, the ministrations of dozens of nurses, aides, technicians, social workers, chaplains, office staff were showered on us.  For a while we basked in the prayers and good wishes, the karma of hundreds of people, many we did not even know.  Our existence became defined by our struggle with cancer.  It brought focus.  It offered the glimpse of an epiphany, the possibility of a redemption.

These gifts did not depend on our eventual cure or not.  They presented themselves instead as a separate expression of a different kind of healing.  For the sake of those others who did not survive, for the sake of all that was expended on our behalf, for the sake of all that it seems that we must strive to honor our own survivorship by remembering those precious lessons that came at so dear a cost.  We must strive to be better persons than we were before cancer.  We have been given a gift.  To not honor it is to compound the tragedy.

Ten years later I am still here.  I am still trying.

Take care, Dennis