Dr. Elisa Port - The New Generation Breast Cancer Book: How to Navigate Your Diagnosis and Treatment Options--and Remain Optimistic--in an Age of Information Overload

T he last feeling you have when youre told that youor someone you lovehas breast cancer? Lucky.

And though it feels like its so commonone in three of all new cancer cases diagnosed each year in women is a breast cancerthe notion that youll have lots of company offers little comfort.

But heres the reality: if you have been diagnosed with breast cancer, you have every reason to be optimistic. At no point in history has the survival rate from breast cancer been better: overall survival from breast cancer now approaches 90 percent. Which means that if youre diagnosed with breast cancer, chances are you will survive and thrive. Even more heartening is that over the last decade the death rate from breast cancer has dropped significantly each year, and that trend continues strongly.

Perhaps youve heard that, thanks to mammograms and early detection, if you are diagnosed with breast cancer today, it will most likely be early stage, which is extremely treatable and curable. And you may know that even for women diagnosed at more advanced stages, there are a growing number of cutting-edge treatment options available, with more on the way each year. But what you may not have heard is that for everyone, we are using less invasive surgery and treatments while still achieving better outcomes, and offering more options for reconstruction than ever before.

All this is the good news. The bad news is that it can be hard for women to hear this message of optimism against all the background noise.

At forty-eight, Katherine was leading a have-it-all kind of life that, as far as she was concerned, couldnt get much fuller. She held a demanding job in human relations for a large tech company; her husband worked full-time, and like Katherines, his job involved lots of travel. Her two girls, ages thirteen and fifteen, were just hitting all the emotional potholes that come with being teenagers. Her seventy-six-year-old mother, who lived five hundred miles away, had recently had heart valve replacement surgery, and Katherine had spent the last few weeks figuring out how to find her good nursing care.

She was juggling it all at a hundred miles an hour, like so many of us do. Then, in a single moment, the daily rhythm of life faded into the background. After her yearly routine mammogram, she was told there was an abnormality and that she had to have a biopsy. When the biopsy results came back, I had to tell Katherine the four words that no woman wants to hear: You have breast cancer.

Katherine responded to the news as so many women that I see do, and perhaps as you have as well. After the initial shock, she, her husband, and I huddled together in my office and spent a long time discussing her options and making some important decisions. By the end of it, Katherine was drained, for sure, but relieved to have a clear plan of action. She felt reassured by the process and comfortable in her treatment plan, and she could turn her focus and her energies to her family and the upcoming surgery. She left my office confident that she would be okay and optimistic about her future.

But within a day or two of our visit, something happened that upset Katherines clarity and balance. I completely understood what was going onI see this in my office all the time.

What happened was this: after she left my office, Katherine headed home and started Googling just about everything having to do with her diagnosis, and she began second-guessing everything. Two days after our meeting, she called me apologetically saying she had a long list of questions she hadnt known to ask during our first meeting, and could she come to see me again? Fortunately, I was able to see her the next day. The Katherine who walked in was a different person. She had a three-inch stack of computer printouts highlighted in three different colors, with Post-it notes flapping off particular pages. Her eyes were bloodshot, and she looked like she hadnt slept since I saw her last. She seemed utterly perplexed and defeated.

And then she began. Shed heard there was a new drug that could be given before surgery to reduce the size of the cancer; what did I think of that? (The drug wasnt right for her kind of cancer.) She had been to a really well-respected website where all the women on it said mastectomy would give her a better survival rate than lumpectomy. (Absolutely not true. In Katherines case, the odds were the same.) She had read that it was a good idea to have her other breast removed too so she would have the lowest likelihood of recurrence. (Again, not at all true in her case.)

I wasnt surprised by Katherines questions. Not only have a womans odds of surviving and living a full and long life after a breast cancer diagnosis increased, but so have the number of sources for obtaining information. Well-meaning friends send emails linking you to websites with a note in the subject line that says Must Read. Family members pass along required reading, or insist that they introduce you to their old friend who has a doctor you must see or a survival story you must hear. And while having a disease that is so commonaffecting one in eight womencan be an advantage because so much is known about it, it can also be a problem: