Whoosh is the sound my busy head continues to make…So earlier this morning when I was walking I did a mind flashback to a few months ago when a new neighbor moved in around the corner from me.  I came out of the house to see a woman with a small black dog I did not know sobbing at the end of my driveway. I went up to her because how can you just leave a human being to sob like that?

So it ends up she had just moved in, was going through a divorce, had a little boy….and a diagnosis for breast cancer.  So I stood on the edge of my driveway that day and let a total stranger pretty much sob on my shoulder.  What else could I do?

Thankfully she is doing fine right now and I have to remember things like that. And she is a really neat woman besides, so I have a new friend too out of it.

I ran into another woman I know who has been through breast cancer and just went through Cadillac Chemo for early ovarian cancer.  They caught it SO early she is either in remission or clean.  She had pushed her insurance company and doctors for a genetic test called a BRCA test :

Breast cancer is a common disease. Each year, approximately 200,000 women in the United States are diagnosed with breast cancer, and one in nine American women will develop breast cancer in her lifetime. But hereditary breast cancer — caused by a mutant gene passed from parents to their children — is rare. Estimates of the incidence of hereditary breast cancer range from between 5 to 10 percent to as many as 27 percent of all breast cancers.

In 1994, the first gene associated with breast cancer — BRCA1 (for BReast CAncer1) was identified on chromosome 17. A year later, a second gene associated with breast cancer — BRCA2 — was discovered on chromosome 13. When individuals carry a mutated form of either BRCA1 or BRCA2, they have an increased risk of developing breast or ovarian cancer at some point in their lives. Children of parents with a BRCA1 or BRCA2 mutation have a 50 percent chance of inheriting the gene mutation.

Hmmm? How do I get that and a PET scan?  But I think I will have to.

Apparently 1 in 9 women get breast cancer per year and in this area of  PA/NJ/DE  the numbers are higher at 1 in 6.

Madam hates being a statistic.

But I am still O.K.

Later people.