Marisa C. Weiss - Taking Care of Your Girls: A Breast Health Guide for Girls, Teens, and In-Betweens

Contents

Our book is dedicated to our close friend and champion,

Antoinette Passo Westphal

The embrace of your love, style, and compassion can be felt by girls and their families all around the worldnow and for years and years to come.
Let every page in this book be one of your wonderful, sweet letters written to every girl who is growing up, becoming a woman, rising to the challenges, and feeling the power, joy, and comfort of her own strength.

Acknowledgments

We want to give heartfelt thank-yous to the rest of our family: Henry, Elias, and David.

Special thanks go to our other daughter-mother team, Lena Walker and Alice Weiss; our editor, Heather Jackson; and our literary agent, Linda Loewenthal, for their excellent guidance and dedication; and to Kathleen Mullaly, for her terrific art direction.

This book wouldnt have been possible without tremendous support from Hope Wohl, Cindy Pelton, Michele Zwiebel, Anne Altomare, Jennifer Paradis, Lisa Petkun, Patty and Gary Holloway, and the Breastcancer.org team and Board of Directors, and Beth Johnson, Bill Kennedy, David Felsen, and faculty from Friends Central School; Elaine Thompson, Jack Lynch, Scott McKinnon, Robin Cohen, Al Denittis; Pat Nogar from Lankenau Hospital; Joan Countryman from Atlanta Girls School; Elizabeth English from the Archer School for Girls; and David Midland and Sue McKenzie from the National Association of Health Education Centers.

We have deep appreciation for the tremendous support from the Westphal family: Ray Westphal, Amanda Radcliffe, Stevie Lucas, and Jeff Westphal. We are blessed by the Kelly Rooney Foundation and Save Second Base, and the dedication of Sean Rooney, Erin Dugery, and Kelly Day.

We are very grateful to school leaders Sr. Jean Levenstein, Dierdre Mecke, Steve Piltch, Helen Hamlet, and Judy Shea, and to the fabulous girls from Notre Dame Academy, Archbishop Prendergast, Lower Merion High School, Shipley, Merion Mercy Academy, Atlanta Girls School, and the Coretta Scott King Leadership Academy, who shared their voices (their names were changed to protect their privacy).

Thanks for terrific support and guidance from Christine Pakkala, Ellen Weiss, Adele Friedman, Margo Weishar, Joanne Gilles-Donovan, Jamie and Marcy Margulies, Renee Dillon Johnson, Harley and Shari Foos, Nina Montee, Harvey Karp, Jessica Laufer, Stefania Magidson, Marge Tabankin, Joyce Ostin, Larry Nortor, Susanna Lachs, Lisa Glassner, Jaana Jovonen, Melanie Bone, Amy Davis, Alan Stolier, Judy Caper, Al Vernachio, Nancy Frandsen, Aileen Roberts, the 2006 Claniel Award, the John C. and Chara C. Haas Charitable Trust, and the Noreen Fraser Foundation.

Dear Isabel and Dr. Weiss,

First, let me just say your assembly at our school was awesome. Listening to our students share their experiences about their breasts transported me back in timeI remember having so many of the same fears, and trying so hard to either hide the fact that I was wearing a bra with baggy sweatshirts or, at times, going through phases where I wanted to wear a thin white T-shirt so everyone knew! Talk about a confusing timeI also remember how my mom handed me a generic growing up book and was so embarrassed to talk about things. I definitely wish she had handed me your book, so I could have seen that there were so many other girls out there who were going through the exact same thing. This is an amazing project.

Jessica, high-school teacher

Introduction

Isabels Take

From Me to You

Its not easy to talk to anyone about the changes your body is going throughespecially the private changes. You want to know everything but you dont want to feel uncomfortable learning about it. So how do you get answers to your questions? How do you find the reassurance that everything is going okay and figure out what to expect next? This can all happen in a bunch of ways. Someone in your family might take you aside for a talk. You might learn some of the things at school or from friends. A book might show up in your room that has a lot of answers (like this one). Or maybe youll see something in a magazine or on TV.

For me things were a little different. I grew up in a unique household. Im not saying puberty wasnt a confusing time for me, because it was. But because both my parents are doctors (as are three of my grandparents), medical information has always been easy to get. I never had the talk because I heard talk about bodies all the time. I also have a very close and open relationship with my cousins and aunts on my moms side of the family. Dinner conversations quickly get carried away, and we share lots of funny and embarrassing stories.

Years before my own breasts even started to develop, my mom and aunts would tell stories and pass down wisdom from their own experiences. Once my aunt Alice told my cousin Lena, eight, and me, ten, that when she was my age, she felt a bump in her breast. Worried that it might be breast cancer, Alice ran downstairs to tell her mother. Her mommy grandmotherassured a panicked Alice that it was not breast cancer at all, but that her breast buds were starting to grow!

We all got a good laugh out of the story, but I had another feeling: huge relief! Id had the same breast cancer scare with my breast bud as Aunt Alice did. That night, Lena and I stayed up late and talked and she said she had been scared too. Even two girls from a family of doctors could freak out about these big changes! From that point on, I knew how important it was to learn about what was going on with my own body; I did not want to be scared every time I noticed a change.

By the time I was eleven years old, I had read through books and talked to friends and family. But I was still not entirely satisfied with the information. My mother is a breast cancer doctor, so I figured that she mainly knew what could go wrong with breasts. My father is a pediatrician, but I wasnt going to ask him anything about my breasts. Lena, at nine, had not yet started puberty, although she was just as curious about all the changes that I was going through. I also wanted to be prepared to teach Lena when she would go through puberty herself. Our joint fascination and eagerness to learn led us to create nipple books. These were books we kept that helped us explore and understand what was going on with our bodies.

That summer, I began to notice more and more how different womens breasts were from each other and from mine. There were so many different shapes and sizes! I was already used to looking at human bodies in a scientific way because of my doctor parents, and this was like my own little observational study. On the beach and around town, Lena and I would observe the different kinds of breasts we saw, then come home and draw them in our nipple books. It was a fun way to spend time together and also to learn about our bodies.

You can see some of my illustrations here, and a bunch more at TakingCareOfYourGirls.com. Most of my illustrations were realistic, others more imaginative, but in recording the findings of our study, we came to one conclusion: every set of breasts is different and unique. It took me a while to realize that everything I had read about breasts and breast development applied to breasts that looked completely different. Lena and I thought that was pretty cool.