Susan Mary Beausang · Health & Wellness Expert

As I write about in my “Three Generations of Breast Cancer Survivors” story, the experience of watching one female family member after another confront repeated diagnoses of breast cancer established a major and dark cloud of fear over my siblings and I. I had to push hard and long to convince all 6 of my siblings to undergo genetic testing for the breast cancer gene mutations, BRCA-1 and BRCA-2. When we received confirmation that 5 out of 7 of us were BRCA-2 carriers, I felt absolutely doomed and just could not live with that feeling. While potentially hard to understand from someone el…

At no other point in history has medical science included the tools, technology and pharmaceutical medicines that today not only prolong our lives, but allow us to survive in the face of life-threatening disease. Our doctors and nurses study long and hard to master the tools of modern medical science so that they can direct our medical treatments with the deeply valuable goal of preserving our lives. Such mastery often requires deep specialization, making Western medical specialists leading experts in their fields of specialization. But what have we given up in this quest for specializat…

If we can face life’s challenges feeling good about ourselves, we can often meet those challenges with more clarity, more determination, and more understanding. At no time is such love of self more important than when fighting cancer. And yet many women find their love of self to be compromised by the emotions stirred when they find a bald, “sick-looking” person staring back at them in the mirror. Even women who rise above self-deflating thoughts must guard against the public stares, looks of pity and unsolicited comments that remind them that they visually represent cancer simply becaus…