Archive for February, 2009

Tennessee Woman Fakes Breast Cancer

A Tennessee woman has been arrested for fraud on charges that she lied about having breast cancer for several years to her employer and coworkers.  Lying about an illness is actually a psychological disorder that has a name to it, but what it is I can’t remember, and it definitely is something that needs to be addressed by therapy, which this woman is smart enough to get as she has stated in a letter to her coworkers apologizing for the lie and saying she does not know why she continued to lie about having breast cancer for years.

It may be a need for sympathy, from a psychological standpoint.  I know there is also a variation of this illness where parents actually make their children sick in order to gain sympathy, even to the point of killing their children for sympathy (have you ever seen the Sixth Sense, this is what happened to the girl that Hayley Joel Osment’s character keeps seeing in the dark, she’s trying to tell him that her mother slowly poisoned her and that is why she ended up dying).

The woman from Tennessee is 38 years old and was arrested after it was discovered that she was not undergoing treatment for breast cancer as she had claimed.  The sad part is she had falsely played on the sympathy of her coworkers and collected hours and hours of paid sick leave that were donated by those that felt a duty to help her out with her treatments and time needed off due to her illness, and she also accepted cash donations from some under these false pretenses.

It is unclear who started to be suspicious or how it was discovered that she had been fabricating the breast cancer story for years in order to get paid time off and sympathy from coworkers and perhaps others who weren’t in the know,  but she was arrested and will be brought on charges.  Apparently she really did have breast cancer which was diagnosed back in 2000, but after radiation therapy, she was declared cancer free just a year or two later, and it has never come back, so it’s almost like she just kept perpetuating the illness after she was no longer sick.

Banned for Breast Implants

Sarah Blewden, an aspiring professional boxer, after being a former model, was denied the request to fight in the ring professionally in a boxing club after it was disclosed that she had breast implant surgery back in 2003.  Officials denied the request for her to fight in the ring after she started the hobby but soon discovered she was good at it and wanted to pursue it further, saying that boxing could potentially ruin her breast implants and cause other complications such as capsular contracture, or damage to the breast tissue.

She countered saying that if she did suffer some sort of damage to her breasts, even after wearing protective breast plates in the ring, she would make the decision to get corrective surgery on her own.  Fair enough, right? I guess not, because the former model was still denied access to the boxing ring.  This story comes out of Britain, where breast implants are just about as popular as they are here in the US.

I don’t know about you, but this sounds like good, old fashioned discrimination to me. I mean, if she’s willing to wear protective gear to protect her breast implants and natural breast tissue, and has acknowledged that she will have to pay for corrective surgery on her own and any other medical bills that result from breast tissue of implant trauma, then why is she still being denied?

Sheyla Hershey Making Headlines with Her 38kkk Breasts

This has to be one of the craziest things I’ve ever seen, and I really don’t understand what drove this 28 year old Texas woman to get breast implant operations multiple times to get breasts that look like they are two basketballs sticking out of her chest, but Sheyla Hershey, the women who has record breaking breasts, is the proud owner of these new twins, and not without controversy either.

American doctors refused to give Sheyla Hershey any more breast augmentation surgeries, she had already had eight surgeries here in the states to get her breasts enlarged considerbaly, but she wasn’t content with that and went to Brazil where there are no restrictions on breast size in augmentation procedures, and had the operation done.  It hurts my back just to look at pictures of this woman, who by the way has a pretty face, but seems to be going for the porn star look.

I can’t help but think this kind of a stunt reeks of desperation and low self esteem.  Having implants this large is simply not a good idea.  Not only will these babies be a huge strain on her back, but they also have a bigger chance of coming away from the tissue, which causes a painful condition called capsular contracture.  Good luck Sheyla, I hope this makes you happy, and if it does, all the more power to you.  Just because I don’t understand it, to each their own !

Breast Feeding and Pumping Quite a Chore

It struck me as I was talking to a friend of mine on Super Bowl Sunday (we had a party), how hard it is for women to breast feed and pump milk sometimes.  What brought the subject up was we were talking about the power outage that lasted here in northeast ohio for a few days, and it came up that she was mad because she had just pumped so many bags of breast milk out for her young, now nine month old infant baby girl, and was determined that all that work and milk wasn’t going to go to waste!

Who could blame her, I can only imagine that pumping breast milk gets monotonous!  But seriously, many women are choosing to breast feed these days because of the increasing awareness over the supposed health benefits that it offers your infant, from better and more robust brain and organ development, to offering your child the bonding experience, to helping their brains develop smarter and faster than if they had been fed on bottle milk from infancy.

Then I came across a funny, but honestly also  kind of scary little ensemble of things you can do to get ready for breast feeding.  I thought that it was a serious article, but after I got past the third recommendation of “drawing blue lines up and down your breast” I realized that it was a joke.  I guess your boobs get a little veiny when you’re breast feeding, eh?

God bless those new moms who can breast feed their kids!

Breast Cancer Survival Better Foretold With New Tool?

There may be a new tool on the horizon for doctors to use when it comes to determining the likelihood of a woman responding well to treatment for breast cancer.  Since we now have genetic testing to tell a woman if she may be more susceptible genetically to getting breast cancer in the first place, this new tool may complement all the other new treatments and testing that are out there now because it may be able to address that one hanging item out there when it comes to successful breast cancer treatment, and that is being better able to tailor treatments to women from the get go so that they have better odds of survival.

How is that done?  Well, it’s simple really, it’s a test that can show a woman’s likelihood of survival because it tests how the proteins in the body interact with the cancerous tumor. By looking at this interaction, scientists can better gauge how agressive the cancer may likely be in a woman, and then the doctors can go about tailoring just the right type of treatment for them so they can have the best chances for recovery.

What’s fascinating is that they were able to narrow down the research between survivors and those that did not survive the disease to a commonality in the way the proteins that fight breast cancer were networked in the body.  Women who did and did not survive had the same, respectively, look to their networks and because of that similarity, scientists were able to conclude that they had higher or lower rates of survival.

This is key because if doctors know from the onset of the disease what a woman’s likelihood is of survival, they can better align their treatment or therapy with that knowledge.  For example, if a woman has a lower likelihood of survival, then they can go with a much more agressive treatment from the beginning.

What’s the Breast Cancer Gene Got to Do With Prostate Cancer?

Hmm, this is some very interesting information, and points to the conclusion that men may indeed need to be very worried about whether they are also carriers for the breast cancer gene, which is known for dramatically increasing the likelihood that a woman may develop breast cancer, and which also may prove to be a multi purpose sort of cancer gene because it’s demonstrating that it may also play a role in men’s risks of getting prostate cancer.  Not to trivialize the importance of this gene by calling it multipurpose, but I’m trying to get the point across that this gene may cause a lot more problems than initially thought, for both women and men.

The two breast cancer genes that have been identified, which are called  BRCA1 and BRCA2 in medical terminology, may be partially responsible for giving men an even more agressive form of prostate cancer than if they did not have the so called breast cancer gene.  Men with certain mutations of this gene are more likely to be affected, and if they were tested positive for these specific mutations, esepecially if they were in one of the more at risk ethic groups of Jewish and European descent, they would need to be more vigilent in their PSA screenings which show evidence of elevated levels of a chemical in the body that indicates prostate cancer may have developed.

The studies that have been done so far have shown that the presence of the breast cancer gene that has mutated definitely has a correlation to more agressive and faster growing prostate tumors in men, but they have not yet developed a way to test tumors on the prostate that have these agressive tendencies, making it harder to figure out which men should be going through more agressive and serious treatment earlier on.  Especially since prostate tumors can be present for years and not even grow that much.

It certainly does say that the medical industry is concerned they may over treat men who don’t need that level of intervention yet, and it also says that we have a long way to go when it comes to diagnosing the seriousness of certain tumors, and gene therapy may eventually give us a huge leg up in that area, making successful and effective treatments more attainable.  This may also lead to more developments against breast cancer as well since they do involve the same gene.

“Side Boob” Shots on Network TV

I really like this phrase that my boyfriend coined on his very own, or maybe he heard it somewhere else and ripped it off.  At any rate, it’s funny!  We’ve been watching episodes of NYPD Blue from the beginning of the series, and one of their biggest traits was to start showing mild nudity on network TV, which is why the show (aside from great writing and acting) skyrocketed to popularity pretty much out of the gates when it was introduced in 1992, the year I graduated from high school.

Two of the shots that the show was known for, and the most it could get away with because it was on network television, albeit at a later hour, were the bare butt shots and the “side boob” shots.  We’ve so far gotten to see lots of butt shots of David Caruso, some random hard body guy that was a doped up cop, another cops bare butt, and some perpetrators bare butt in the series.  Jimmy Smits just joined the cast, and I’m only hoping we get a glimpse of his (I’ve always really liked him as an actor).

As far as side boob shots, there’s been a few random women, plus we’ve seen side breast shots of actresses Sharon Lawrence (very little though, she was at a severe angle in her character Sylvia’s love scene with Dennis Franz), and the equally stunning actress Gail O’Grady’s side breasts (she’s got big ones if the side view is any indication).  The show’s producers said they pushed the envelope with the breast shots because they were warned there were strict instructions for indecency to not show any nipple in the shot.

Jees, we Americans think we’re so progressive, and I guess there are still enough of us that get freaked out over seeing breasts that they have to worry about regulating that stuff.  Of course the language in NYPD Blue was a first for network tv also, with the bad words shit, ass and dick being used widely – oh yes, and I believe I’ve heard a view douchbags and assholed in there too.  Gotta love that show – it’s groundbreaking tv!

Capsular Contracture and Big Breast Implants

I just read an astonishing story about a Brazilian model and actress who had a gallon of silcone injected into her breast implants to make her a FF cup, which is ridiculously large, and I can’t even imagine lugging those big puppies along all the time.  I have to ask myself, women who get breast implants this big, is this some kind of psychosis?  A need to be superior over other women (when in fact they look ridiculous, sure the select men who may gawk at them might give them a temporary rise in self esteem, but over the long haul, aren’t they just being looked at as a piece of meat?)

Don’t get me wrong, I wholly support plastic surgery when it’s done to increase one’s self respect and they have a genuine issue with a body part or aspect of their physical appearance that can be easily and safely corrected with a cosmetic procedure, but it’s women like this that give plastic surgery a bad name.  In fact, this particular woman said she’s not finished and she’s going to get them even larger.  Many states don’t even allow for certain sizes because the risk for complications, including infection and capsular contracture, can be enormously inflated when the implants are just too large.

What happens is that the breast implant is so heavy that it may separate itself from the surrounding tissue, making a good case for caspular contracture and other complications like infection, and complicating the whole procedure, many times needing to go in for multiple operations to get the darn things fixed.  Why would any woman want to subject themselves to that simply to have breasts that are just over the top and ridiculous looking?  I don’t get it.