Word: cancerous
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...showed my mammograms to four other radiologists. Excessive, maybe. But one was equivocal, and the other three said they would never have suggested a biopsy. That was reassuring but confusing. The fact remained that a skilled radiologist had raised the specter of breast cancer, and while other doctors saw things differently, I was stuck. No one could undo her written report, not in this litigious age. Meanwhile, the idea that I might have cancer had taken root. I knew that if I didn't have the tissue analyzed by a pathologist, I'd never stop worrying...
...scar? A grape? We're talking about my breasts, which I happen to be quite fond of. And given their modest proportions, I hardly had any to spare. Fear and vanity battled for control. Even though 80% of biopsies are benign, I was terrified the doctors would find cancer. I panicked. I wanted another opinion. Lots of other opinions...
Last week's J.A.M.A. study seemed to tip the balance even further in raloxifene's favor. Researchers, led by Dr. Steven Cummings of the University of California at San Francisco, reported that taking the drug for 3 1/2 years reduced a woman's risk of developing breast cancer an average of 75%. By contrast, a study of tamoxifen completed last year showed that it reduced the incidence of breast cancer 45% over four years. As an added bonus, raloxifene also lowered the amount of LDL, or "bad cholesterol," in the blood...
...would be a mistake, however, to conclude that raloxifene must be the better drug; the two studies are not directly comparable. The J.A.M.A. study looked at women who had a low risk of developing breast cancer, whereas the tamoxifen experiment was conducted using women who had a high risk of getting the disease. Yet women with a high risk of breast cancer are less likely to develop the kind of estrogen-sensitive tumors that respond to designer estrogens...
DIED. BASIL CARDINAL HUME, 76, leader of the Roman Catholic Church in England and Wales; of cancer; in London. Hume, appointed by Pope Paul VI in 1976, was entrenched in tradition, yet had a modern sensibility that irked his critics. For example, he said that most people who ignored the church's position on birth control were "good, conscientious and faithful...