Author Archive

Hope and Triple Negative Breast Cancer: Now in Paperback

Remember when your doctor told you that you had breast cancer?

“Oh, yes,” you sigh.

And remember when your doctor told you it was an especially aggressive form called triple-negative, or estrogen negative?

“Oh, yes,” you shudder.

I suspect your reaction was like mine — confusion and terror.

Well, I was there eight years ago, and now, look what I have done. I survived. Eight …

Changing Paths

[This was originally published on Positives About Negative on August 26, 2013.]

Old paths are such comforts. Losing them feels like losing the coziness of an old friendship.

Today we took a new path through the woods and got a bit lost. The familiar markers were gone and their comfort and clarity gone with them. That’s often the way with forging a trail — you …

(Un) Common Knowledge Transcript

Below is an edited version of the webinar I presented through the Triple-Negative Breast Cancer Foundation October 16, 2012. You can still get the actual webinar on the Foundation’s site. It was based on questions sent in from women with TNBC.  

I was diagnosed with hormone negative breast cancer in 2006, and I’ve been studying this disease since then, reading research papers, interviewing experts and …

SABCS: A Recap of Triple-Negative Research

The best news from the 2013 San Antonio Breast Cancer Symposium is its emphasis on triple-negative breast cancer. There are so many papers presented on the subject that I can’t keep up. Those of us who have been hanging around this dance for a long time—I was diagnosed in 2006—remember the frustration of seeing and hearing little about this disease from researchers and nothing from …

Giving Thanks in My Seventh Decade

[This was originally published on Positives About Negative on January 2, 2011.]

I turned 65 last week and I am not sure what to make of it. Yes, getting older is better than the alternative, as my bout with cancer made extremely clear. Still, that’s old. Medicare old. If I got robbed, the news story could very well describe me as elderly.

I was diagnosed …