A Different Word and I Wouldn't Have Needed Radical Surgery
Big surprise. Doctors are only now finding out that if they don't use the word "cancer" in a diagnosis, women are far more likely to opt for watchful waiting and medication than surgery. That's because recently medical boards have been talking about taking the word out of a common diagnosis for women with noninvasive breast cancer, or ductal carcinoma in situ (DCIS). It's the word carcinoma that makes us sit up and freak, and it was the word used when I was diagnosed, so I went through treatment to the max. I wrote about this recently when I first heard about it. I was diagnosed with stage 0 precancerous breast cancer but I was treated as if I had full-blown invasive cancer. Nine years ago, that's the way it was done. To be fair, my cancer or abnormal cells or whatever they were, were grade 3, right on the edge of becoming invasive cancer, so decisions were made based mostly on that. There was no doubt that if I didn't have treatment, in time I w...