A newly diagnosed woman needs our help

Good Morning Family - it is with great sadness that I share I was contacted yesterday by a caring family to advise that their neighbor was diagnosed with cancer. She is located in Las Vegas and on July 24th the caring neighbors will be hosting a bar-b-que fundraiser. I will be in the house!!!!!!!

We need nice gift items for the silent auction that night and I need as many of you as possible to send cards...gifts.....love and virtual hugs to Ru, a new diagnosed cancer patient.

I will be blogging about my journey with her and in the meantime PLEASE send her cards (just imagine if it were you and how nice a card would make her feel). In the beginning of August 2009, I reached out to my Internet family and asked everyone to send my mom a birthday card - her birthday was August 8th. She died on August 22nd and spent the last two weeks of her life knowing how much she was loved by all of the cards she received from strangers.

Please mail your cards, financial gifts and well wishes to:
Ms. Ru H.
9828 Pioneer Ave.
Las Vegas, Nevada 89117

Thank you,
Saideh Browne
Exec., Director
National Women's Cancer Alliance, Inc.

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Exercise helps gold-medal gymnast Shannon Miller battle cancer

Shannon Miller's competitive spirit and lifelong love for exercise are helping her fight the brave fight again. This time, beating cancer is her mission.

"A friend said to me, 'This cancer diagnosis is like being on the balance beam. You fall off. You get back up.' " The former Olympic gold-medal gymnast is back up after being diagnosed with a germ cell malignancy, a form of ovarian cancer, in December. She started nine weeks of chemotherapy March 9 after doctors removed a baseball-size cyst and an ovary. And she started an exercise program that she follows faithfully, even during treatment.

Experts say she is on the right track, assisting her treatment by exercising. Many of the 12 million cancer survivors in the U.S. would also benefit, they say. "There is a growing body of research showing exercise not only helps with the side effects of treatment but also decreases the recurrence risk and improves overall survival," said researcher Melinda Irwin, an associate professor of epidemiology and public health at Yale.

"My prognosis is good," said Miller, 34. She says her doctors have said they're hopeful that she and her husband, John Falconetti, will be able to have more children. Their son, Rocco, is 15 months old. The family lives in Jacksonville, Fla., near John's parents, who, along with friends, help with Rocco on treatment days.

Miller concedes that it isn't easy. She says there are many days she just wants to lie in bed, usually during the first week of a three-week treatment cycle. That's when she has five straight days of chemotherapy for five to six hours a day. The other two weeks, she has chemo one day a week. Nutrition can be a problem. She says she always has had a tendency to become dehydrated, and at one point, she ended up in the hospital because of dehydration after a round of chemo.

Exercise isn't always possible, but more often than not, she said, she finds time to

be on her exercise mat at home.

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By Janice Lloyd for USA Today

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Ovarian cancer screening reduces death rate only modestly

Ovarian cancer is one of the most feared diseases because the tumor often produces no symptoms and the disease is often detected at an advanced stage. Despite vigorous research, there are no good screening tests that can be recommended for all women on a regular basis, such as there is with breast cancer and mammography. And that is unlikely to change anytime soon.

In a study reported Monday, researchers used a mathematical model to predict that death rates would fall by only about 11% from their current levels if women were to undergo regular ovarian-cancer screening with the best available technology. That technology is the CA 125 blood test followed by ultrasound imaging of the ovaries if the CA 125 test is abnormal.

The reason why screening with the current methods is underwhelming may be because there are different types of ovarian cancers. The authors of the study, from Duke University Medical Center, estimated that some ovarian cancers are slow-growing, spending about 24 months at Stage I and 12 months at Stage 2. A more aggressive phenotype is assumed to spend about eight months at Stage I and only five months at Stage 2 before advancing.

"If we assume ovarian cancers grow and spread at different rates, the best screening strategy available will only reduce the number of women dying from the cancer by 11%," the lead author of the paper, Dr. Laura Havrilesky, said in a news release. "This is partially because the slower growing cancers are more likely to be caught by a screening test."

It may be time to invest more effort in prevention and treatment of ovarian cancer since screening has shown such little value so far, the authors noted. However, in a commentary accompanying the study, experts pointed out that while routine screening is not recommended for everyone, women with a significant family history of the disease or who carry genes that increase the risk should talk to their doctors about the value of regular screening.

The study was published in the journal Cancer.
By Shari Roan, Los Angeles Times

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