The Pest

Worry is not gracious or a genial companion.

Remembrance 

It is just shy of afternoon

when the grief slams into me

like an aching wave in my abdomen

and a stuck placein my parched throat.

I have not shed many tears

until late one night, the full moon showing,

I awoke, startled, at 2 a.m.and cried out, reaching

not for my father, just passed

but my mother, nine years gone.

My body filled with wracking, heaving sobs,

I stood up blindly, fought my way to the living room

where my husband lay sleeping spread-eagled

on the scratched rust-colored leather couch,

nodding off after a late night’s work.

Drowsily, he enfolded me in his arms.

Sssh, he whispered,

as if he held the wailing infant I once was.  

Those awful nights –when you’re haunted by a memory, a conflict of the heart, an anxiety dream. We’ve all experienced those nights of tossing and turning, without sleep, that somehow… and wonderfully, pass into lovely days. A poem that digs into and chronicles one of those recent nights for me:

Night, Awakened

by Barbara Boughton 

The door creaks.

I slip out of the bedroom,

where you lie sleeping,

fitfully, under heavy blankets.

3 a.m.  A dangerous time in our little house.

A haunting dream awakens me.

My mind is snared by thoughts of the hidden, shadowy self. 

I sink into the plush brown living room chair,

enshroud myself in grandma’s knitted blanket,

sipping cool white wine,

feeling it course under my tongue.

I remember past slights and buried angers,

the pain we provokedin each other’s hearts,

the way we exposed our weakest places.

I try to recapture the joy of those bright afternoons,

when we hugged and leaned into each other,

laying down balm for our wounds. 

Peering into the darkness,

where the cats, disgruntled, slide by silently,

I wait for the first rays of sunlight,

hours and hours to go

until you awake

the room is filled with warmth,

the smell of tangerines, fresh ground coffee,

the vigorous routine and lively rhythm of the coming day begins. 

A fascinating new study may shed light on the reasons why men get more squamous cell skin cancers than women.

Squamous cell skin cancer is a type that is usually curable, and about 250,000 cases are diagnosed annually.

While squamous cell skin cancer usually isn’t fatal, it’s no laughing matter either. Squamous cell skin cancer can be disfiguring or even endanger health, if left untreated.Squamous cell skin cancer affects three times as many men as it does women. But why? Researchers have long thought that the reasons were linked to lifestyle – since men tend to be less zealous than women about protecting themselves from the sun. But an interesting new study suggests that the reason may lie in characteristics of male skin.

While the study was done in animals, it is the first of its kind to suggest that male skin has less innate protection against ultraviolet light than female skin – and that’s what makes it exciting.The study showed that after being exposed to ultraviolet light, the skin of male rats had lower antioxidant levels and diminished DNA repair capacity when compared to females.Although the females were more likely to suffer inflamed skin – a sunburn – after exposure to UV light, the males sustained more genetic damage from the same amount of UV light.

“Our data tells us that female skin has more antioxidants, compounds that scavenge DNA damaging chemicals,and potentially more mechanisms to repair DNA damage than male skin,” said Kathleen Tober, PhD, a research scientist in Ohio State’s Department of Pathology. “These gender differences suggest that female skin has a higher capacity for repairing sunlight induced DNA damage than does male skin.Without complete repair of this genetic damage, male skin is more prone to skin cancer than is female skin.”

Tober’s study was presented at the American Association for Cancer Research Frontiers in Cancer Prevention meeting in Philadelphia in early December.While the study points out one reason why male skin is more prone to skin cancer than female skin, it also underlines the link between the sun and the damage it can cause.

Overexposure to the sun’s rays can cause irrepairable damage to the DNA of skin cells –damage that may eventually lead to skin cancer. And while male skin may be more prone to this damage than female skin, all of us need to take heed to prevention messages about skin cancer. So, to my mind, this study is one more reason to cover up and slap on the sunscreen when out in the sun.

As someone who’s lost both parents to cancer (my father at 79, my mother at 71) I know a little bit about grief. Here’s a poem that talks about the grief I went through after my father’s losing battle with lung cancer, and his death several years ago. I truly felt like an orphan after he died, but somehow I managed to get through it:

Grief Talking

I got through the day

on Xanax and chocolate ice cream sandwiches,

my thoughts whirling,

putting one foot in front of another,

haltingly.

In spite of everything,

I got up and continued on.

I noticed the yellow Mexican marigolds,

bushy from long neglect,

outside my bedroom window,

still turning their faces

upwards for the steady hot-beamed sun.

Today at the beauty salon the young woman rinsing out my hair commented: “You have beautiful skin,” she said. As a survivor of skin cancer, I was reminded of what a gift healthy skin is, and how important it is to maintain it.

Each day I smooth make-up on my face with a sunscreen in it. I don’t go out of the house without it. I remember how wonderful it was to find this makeup 20 years ago. Back then, there were no foundations with sunscreens in them. You had to apply sunscreen (often gooey and irritating to the eyes), then apply your base makeup over it.

Now things are different. It’s easy to find makeup that has sunscreen with SPF 15 –there’s even a line of makeup with powders that come complete with sunscreen of SPF 15.

But in other ways, things haven’t changed. Tanning salons are still quite popular — and people don’t realize how damaging these can be to the skin, and that they are no safer than sun exposure.

In fact, it’s easy to prevent skin cancer — just don’t overexpose yourself to the sun or to tanning salons. Wear a hat and cover up when you’ll be spending extended hours in the sun.

Years ago, when I asked famed scientist Margaret Kripke what the cure would eventually be for skin cancer her answer was simple. “It’s prevention,” she said. “To stop skin cancer in the rats in my lab I just have to do one thing–turn off the UV lights,” she said.

Hello and welcome to my blog. I’m a medical writer with 25 years of experience in writing about health and medicine. This blog will be about my reactions to news in health and medicine, about my experiences as a medical writer, and about my new book Reduce Your Cancer Risk: Twelve Steps to a Healthier Life, co-authored with Michael Stefanek of the American Cancer Society. The book features information on how to reduce cancer risk using genetic counseling, nutrition and exercise, supplements, preventive medications and more. Wish me luck - I have 2 chapters written so far!  

This past Friday instead of working on my book, I turned on the TV to watch “How to Look Good Naked.” It was interesting, because it actually applied to one of the subjects of my book – weight gain and cancer. In the show, a woman was featured who had been through treatment for Hodgkins Lymphoma. In the process, she had put on quite a bit of weight, because of hormone therapy, and was suffering lack of self-esteem because of it.

The show handled the subject quite sensitively. And it pointed out something that a lot of people don’t know about cancer treatment – that it makes you gain weight, which can be a blow to a woman’s self-esteem. Of course that’s secondary to going through fairly toxic treatments and having a life-threatening disease, but it’s an issue that many people deal with.

In the show, they first had the young woman strip down to her underwear. She confessed that she was quite self-conscious about her middle. “People talk about the apple or the pear shape – I feel like I have the pineapple shape,” she said.

So, to combat her ideas about her supposedly big stomach, the show’s narrator had her place herself in line in a group of normal to quite overweight women. But as it turned out, she was way off base. She actually had the second most thinnest stomach compared to the other women, when she thought her stomach was one of the fattest.

Because of her weight gain, and the resulting drop in her self-esteem, the woman had stopped pursuing one of her favorite hobbies: dancing. So the show featured her taking a dance lesson with an incredibly hunk-y instructor in a class of talented dancers. She actually did quite well, and the whole experience seemed to boost her confidence
.
“How to Look Good Naked” is a makeover show, so it featured the obligatory scenes of going shopping for clothes that make you look 10 pounds thinner and a hair and makeup re-do that made the subject appear incredibly glamorous.

The end was surprising. The show asked the woman to pose naked, and surprisingly, she agreed. It was all done tastefully, however, with a draped sheet, and she looked beautiful. In the end, they displayed the photo on a huge billboard and asked passersby what they thought. The replies were that she looked gorgeous and she even got several requests for dates!

All in all, kudos to the show for taking on the issue of cancer and body image, and making it clear that big women can be beautiful.

Here’s a poem I wrote about my Dad’s battle with lung cancer, and my own grief after his death. I really wish you were here today, Dad.

Miss you Dad, your smile, and your sense of humour about life. Although cancer spelled an end to your life, it never defeated your gentle, ironic spirit.

Even when you were told you had cancer that had spread to your spine you didn’t lose your appreciation for life: “It’s been a good run,” you said simply and eloquently.

Snapshots of My Father

By Barbara Boughton

In the shadows, time passes,
waits for you.
Your hand reaches up,
holding your forehead with worry,
your thin restless legs,
jutting out from under the covers.

Last evening the nurse’s uniform grew bloody
as you tried to fight yourself up from bed
out of this antiseptic-smelling hollow place.
I’ve got to go home, you said,
where you could escape the descending unknown.

Daddy, how I wish
you could push open the door to our house once again
and I could greet your quizzical smile
with a whooping tomboy shout,
rifling through your pockets with pleasure,
you stooping carefully towards me,
I hunting through jangling coins for
a half-torn off package,
your favorite sweet, fragrant spearmint gum.

When breast cancer patient Meredith Biegel had a massage four days after her mastectomy, the experience surprised her. Instead of deep Swedish massage, therapist Cheryl Chapman used a light touch that relaxed and soothed Biegel. As beautiful music played, and lit candles filled the room, Chapman used the back of her hand to softly massage Biegel’s body.

“I was filled with so much fear and tightness in my body beforehand,” Biegel, 43, says. “But afterward I felt relaxed, as if Cheryl’s hands were a little magical.”

Chapman, a former oncology nurse who specializes in training massage therapists to work with cancer patients, says massage can be beneficial for women with breast and reproductive cancers. As well as relaxing muscles, light massage can loosen and soften scars, improve range of motion, increase circulation and decrease pain.

“The use of touch is just very therapeutic for cancer patients,” says Chapman of Shorthills, N.J.
Though research on massage is slim, it’s starting to show the benefits of touch therapy. A recent study of 34 women with breast cancer by Maria Hernandez Reif, M.D., PhD of the University of Miami, revealed that those who went through massages three times a week for five weeks experienced a significant drop in anxiety, anger and depression when compared to a control group. Body chemicals such as serotonin and dopamine that increase relaxation went up, as did the number of natural killer (NK) cells in the women’s blood. NK cells help boost the action of the immune system.

Previous research at the University of Miami and other universities has revealed that massage can also decrease chronic pain, insomnia, and stress. “Massage reduces cortisol, a stress hormone that if chronically elevated destroys healthy immune cells,” Hernandez-Reif says. A type of massage called Shiatsu, also known as acupressure, can help alleviate nausea as well, according to Chapman.

Massage therapists who work with cancer patients typically work with a light touch and may employ healing herbal oils and creams as well. Samantha Stormer, a massage therapist and aromatherapist, owner of Sacred Beginnings in Corte Madera, CA, uses oils such as frankincense and yarrow to increase relaxation and decrease inflammation in cancer patients. “Massage and aromatherapy can help a person heal—if the therapist knows what he or she is doing,” she says.

There are some important cautions for women with cancer who want to use massage therapy. Deep tissue work or Swedish-type massage can be dangerous, causing bruising. The therapist should avoid radiation burns and areas with lymphedema, unless he or she is trained in manual lymph drainage, a type of specialized light massage that helps drain the lymph channels. Regular aromatherapy or straight massage can cause spasms in the lymph vessels, increasing the lymphedema swelling. The therapist should also have specialized training in working with cancer patients.

Massage cannot spread cancer, according to trained massage therapists and physicians. This belief is simply an old myth.

This article originally appeared in Mamm Magazine.