Author Archive

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 …

What, Me Worry? And Worry, and Worry

I know a woman who has lived more than 30 years after a diagnosis of estrogen-negative breast cancer. When I asked her recently if she still worried about it returning, she said, “Not really.” I love that the fear eventually goes away, but I hope it is far sooner than 30 years, as by then I will be 90 and, at the rate I am …