Breast Cancer and me is kind of like Soupy Sales and me:  It never really happened.  But I do know one thing, contrary to what our resident "Doctor-in-the House" maintains.  Several things actually:  I went to nursing school, an intensive kind of course.  But I flunked out when we came to the course called "Extreme Bedpans" and I puked upon the patient.   I realized I'd always wanted to be a doctor, so began taking pre-med courses.  Physics I -- I was blonde, still am, and in the sixties everybody "knew" blondes were dumb, including the brilliant professor, physicist who helped develop the atomic bomb.  He bombed me every chance he got with those demeaning little jokes that could  shatter the very  bones of an extremely inteligent woman, which I was.  Flunked it twice due to psychological psabotage.  So I gave up that dream. 

Then I ran away with the Circus with the elephant trainer in the elephant car (another story for another day) and happed upon a book called the Indian Herbalogy of North America, which told of the healing herbs the Native Americans used before the all-glorious white man brought them syphilis and smallpox at no extra charge.  That book led me to explore our ancestors' old ways of healing with what they had, simple things made from plants that grew wild.

Came the day when I worked with the Department of Epidemiology, Department of Public Health.  Wayyyyyy down in the basement in a far back corner was a door with the nubbly glass in the top part to keep privacy.  On the door,  small gold letters said "The Tumor Project."   We couldn't figure it out until one day the woman who worked in there told us "We collect tumors for the CDC."  Atlanta is the home of the Communicable Disease Center and our Health Department cooperated with them on many experiments.  Fast forward leaving out many other fascinating incidents....  One leisurely Sunday I opened the newspaper.  Huge headline, of course, "CDC discovers cause of breast cancer!!!!"  Seems that the mysterious door in the basement was the home of collectors of breast cancer tumors, which the CDC dissected and analyzed to find the cause.

(Disclaimer:  everything in this story is the truth except the part about throwing up on the patient.  I wanted to, but it was entirely against the rules.  This is true!....)

The tumors had something in common, most of them, they included insecticides, pesticides.

Now Atlanta is the home of many pests and insects, therefore crowds of insectide makers are based there.  Of course a good Southern housewives can't have any ants or "waterbugs" crawling around their house, so they would grab the can of bug spray and just saturate the house.  Of course they breathed in that poison themselves.  And our breasts being closely related to lymph glands, they filter out dangers to our health, especially to our babies' health.  What is a good breast to do?  It can't spit it out or let it back into the blood stream (or maybe it can.)  But it holds it there in one of the most sensitive parts of our bodies.  Well, any poison designed to kill insects can be more simply described as a poison designed to kill.  All life is made of the same stuff, so the insecticides kills the cells around it and they distort into cancer.

I expected that headline to show up in headlines and tv news all across the country and the world.  We had been searching for a cause of cancer for years.  However, the knowledge dropped like a rock thrown in the sea never to be seen again..  Lucky I saw it that one day.  I speculated that politics and enterprise censored it out of our country's reality.  I mean what are poison producers to do if women are afraid to spray that product?  And then again what would the MDs do if the number of cancerous boobies were to shrink so they don't need so much surgery?  They might have to go  out of business or trade their Mercedes for a Prius...   Which actually would be better for the public health by spewing less particulate matter into the air we breathe.

So, dear Dr. Amy, not all potential patients are uneducated illogical dolts.  The old ways of healing (and getting rid of bugs) are healthier than the dreaded knife.  Knowledge of anatomy and physiology as taught in nursing school, plus psychological influences on illness have been extremely important.  My mother's lymphoma was cure by the old Canadian formula for curing cancer.  The world is full of wonders!  And the most wondrous of those is knowledge!