Law Students

Changing Focus

As you may have noticed, the frequency of my posting has dropped off in the past couple of months. Part of that is due to the craziness of the holidays followed by a week of intensive school, but part of it is because I am at a point in my cancer journey where changes don?t happen every day. New news happens less often, thank goodness, and I no longer feel as if I need to journal every ache and pain. Mainly because I don?t have any aches and pains. I know that there are a lot of people still reading, however, and I want to keep writing. This means that I have to figure out what direction to take this blog and to come up with something new to write about. I will continue to update my progress, of course, but I hope there won?t be much more to write about other than the clean bills of health I will receive at each future doctor?s appointment and a documentation of the return of my locks.

One of the focuses of my life in the last nine months has been health. As you can imagine (or as you know if you?ve been down this road), a cancer diagnosis forces you to look at your health in a more critical way than you ever have before. One of the first questions I asked after my diagnosis was ?why me?? The focus of the question was not ?why is this happening to me?? but ?why did I get cancer?? As a young, healthy woman, I couldn?t help but wonder what it was that made these cells proliferate in my body. Was it something I did? Was it something I didn?t do? Something I ate? Something I was exposed to? And the biggest question of all was?and still is??what do I need to do to keep it from coming back??

As part of the large amount of reading and research I have done about cancer, I couldn?t help but read about the many ways that food and exercise and environment affect the rate of cancer in any given population. There is a lot of information out there and much of it is confusing. Is red wine good for us or bad for us? Does exercise help prevent cancer or does it not make any difference in cancer rates? Do food additives cause cancer or is it just a completely random run of bad luck?

The American Cancer Society has said that women have a 1 in 3 chance and men have a 1 in 2 chance of developing some kind of cancer in their lifetimes. With statistics like that staring us in the face, my question is what can we do to lower our risk of developing cancer?

My plan is to share some of what I have learned. I will break it down a little at a time and share what I have found and what I am doing to prevent a recurrence. I don?t know if any of it makes a difference, but I feel as if I need to do whatever I can to prevent a recurrence of breast cancer or to prevent some other kind of cancer from developing. Improving my diet and my overall health makes me feel like I am being proactive and taking control whether or not that is true. And it certainly can't hurt.

Full post as published by The Merits of the Case on January 24, 2008 (boomark / email).