The Breast Cancer Answers Book

BREAST CANCER IS NOT YOUR LIFE.

You hear the words of your diagnosis, “You have breast cancer.” Your anxiety is now reality.

Your world seems suddenly overwhelmed, unpredictable. With the jolting label you did not seek, breast cancer is now a part of your life.

Yet breast cancer is not your life.

MAKE SENSE OF YOUR DIAGNOSIS.

Call upon the strength of your femininity to gain information strength over the words you just heard.

TURN TO INTELLIGENCE.

Based upon decades of patient treatment and medical exper- tise—for the first time in a how-to source co-authored by patient and physician—The Breast Cancer Answers Book offers you wisdom into how “breast cancer” is in fact a variety of diseases, insight into your specific form of breast cancer, why time is your friend, your treatment choices, the roles of each doctor and professional on your medical team, and the power you possess in treating your disease and your body.

Answer your unasked question.

Just as you may be treated so that your breast is surgically recon- structed—how may you achieve Emotional Reconstruction® over breast cancer? Here for the first time is your answer.

JAY K. HARNESS, MD, FACS, a past president of The American Society of Breast Surgeons and Breast Surgery International, works full time in private practice as a breast surgeon in Orange, California. He currently serves as a clinical professor of surgery at University of California, Irvine. For twenty-eight years, Dr. Harness worked in full-time academic general surgery at institutions such as the University of Michigan, Tufts University, the University of California, Davis, and the University of California, San Francisco. For the past three decades, Dr. Harness has advocated for a multidisciplinary team approach to the treatment of breast cancer. He served as the founding medical director of the University of Michigan's Breast Care Center (BCC) in 1985. The Michigan BCC became one the first academic multidisciplinary breast cancer programs in the United States. His first book, Breast Cancer: Collaborative Management, promoted multidisciplinary care. Subsequently, Dr. Harness established and directed similar breast cancer programs in Boston and Orange, California. In 2011 Dr. Harness cofounded Breast Cancer Answers (breastcanceranswers.com), a website designed for patients and their families. This site introduced the first social media program for breast cancer patients, and it provides information from breast cancer experts that can be accessed anonymously and for free. Visitors will find a searchable library of informative videos with answers to questions raised by women with breast cancer.

PHYLLIS GAPEN was a Houston-based journalist who survived breast cancer for twenty-four years. She worked to help generate a vision of how new technology, clinical research, creatively organized medical care, and human compassion can push forward science and medical practice. For more than fifteen years, Phyllis worked with a university team whose engineers helped build advanced Internets for educational and research efforts in Texas. Among other things, that work improved the commodity Internet used by the public. These efforts enabled better transmission of sound and pictures over the Internet, eliminating jerky movements in video playback, and paving the way for popular sites such as YouTube. Better networks also assisted health care professionals in bring- ing innovations to the practice of medicine. The video-based breast cancer website Breast Cancer Answers is just one example of such advances. During her career, Phyllis published more than 100 articles in national publications, including The Wall Street Journal. She edited three books, and her work has been cited in fifteen books on health and science policy. Phyllis often wrote about groups of patients who have difficulty advocating for themselves. She dreamed of a time when cancer therapies would be less toxic, and large numbers of patients would go on to live long, productive lives.