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18 October 2007
Help donate free mammograms For every click you help donate money towards giving mamograms to women in need. There's no catch at all, you just need to click every day for the remaining 13 days.
At lunch, my wife and I were talking about diagnostic radiation. A friend of ours is newly diagnosed with breast cancer, and found out yesterday that her FISH score (I did not know what this was) indicates that she well need to go through chemo. The lump was big by the time she felt it. She'd never had a mammogram.
My wife is the original "mothering magazine" type who is against all vaccinations, a skeptical of all "white man's medicine." She has had mammograms but may not have another one, out of fear of the radiation.
Anyway, I feel like mammograms are a good thing, if not comfortable. Thanks for the opportunity to click.
Hang on, danf... your wife *won't* have another mammogram even though the way you wrote your post makes it seem like an earlier mammogram may have picked up your friend's breast lump before chemo was needed?
Well, as of today. A lot of my wife's beliefs are fear-based, unfortunately.
And, whether my friend could have avoided chemo by being diagnosed earlier is unknown to me. The FISH score measures how much of a certain "bad" protein or something the mass is secreting, and I am not sure if size of the mass is relevant. I just don't know that much about it.
I think that my wife WILL eventually get a mammogram, but she'll complain about it all the way to and from.
As for vaccinations, we went around and around when my kid was young with the concept that, when getting vaccinated, you take on a miniscule (but more than zero) amount of risk, spread throughout a large number of people, in exchange for a large number of people not getting whatever disease. She was stuck on the few and far between reactions that some kids DO have, with most vaccines.
Oh yeah, I'm very utilitarian about vaccinations. I bullied my mother into signing the consent for me to get them at school (you got rubella vaccination in NZ when you were 11) because she was anti as well. I was a bossy little shit.