Word: fisherisms
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Infant T, Infant M and Infant D occupy identical cribs in a small, drab ward on the second floor of Washington's District of Columbia General Hospital. A Fisher-Price mobile dangles above each bed. No one ever visits them. They have never been outdoors...
...surprise, though still a shock, when in 1990 doctors found she had ovarian cancer. Thanks to aggressive surgery and intensive chemotherapy, Fisher, a 41-year-old dietitian living in Pittsburg, California, made a remarkable recovery and became tumor-free. But she knew her future was still menacing. Scientists had recognized for several years that ovarian and breast cancer sometimes ran together in families, as if linked in some way. Fisher's oncologist proposed a once unthinkable step: a "prophylactic" double mastectomy. Removing her breasts, the doctor said, could save her life...
...first Fisher would not even consider it. "I always lived in fear of getting breast cancer because most of the women in my family got it," she said. "But I was too busy trying to survive ovarian cancer to think about breast cancer." Too busy until she read about the work of Mary-Claire King, the University of California, Berkeley, geneticist who is searching for the gene that causes the inherited form of breast cancer and also increases the risk of ovarian cancer...
After joining King's study group, Fisher learned that she carried the telltale pattern of markers. The agonizing question: What should she do? Huge numbers of women will eventually face the same dilemma. The inherited form of breast cancer accounts for 5% to 10% of cases, says King, meaning that "there might be half a million women who either already have or will develop the disease because of this gene." Carriers have an 85% chance of getting breast cancer...
...Fisher's common sense told her that her breasts posed too great a risk, and she had them removed the week before Thanksgiving. "I did the best that I could to prevent breast cancer," she says. "I hope it will be enough...