Husbands Need to Get Involved in Fight Against Breast Cancer

If I had the power, I would put Breast Cancer Victim's Husband Speaks Out by Kathy Reed on the "must read" list of every husband, and his wife. So often, Men don't pay a lot of attention to the health of their wives until they are confronted with a diagnosis. I really believe that most men who read this article will be motivated to discuss the touchy subject of breast cancer with their wives if they realize it could help insure that they won't be be one of the husbands who didn't have a clue until it was too late.

The article was written from a husband's standpoint; a bereaved husband who, 6 years after the death of his wife, is still wondering if perhaps her untimely death at the age of 38 could, somehow, have been prevented.

The author deals mostly with how the victim's husband describes their battle and fight against his wife's breast cancer. We are given an intimate picture of how the couple reacted to the diagnosis; the wife not wanting it to be true and thus delaying treatment for a couple of months while the husband urged her to begin treatment. This may sound foolish to us, but it is a very common reaction. Women usually fear the worst, a disfiguring mastectomy, and pushing that decision off as long as possible seems to be her only refuge at the time.

When treatment was finally begun, the cancer had increased drastically in size. According to the husband in this example, there can be no turning back once a diagnosis is made. Your life of necessity becomes consumed with fighting this horrible disease. You are both unsure of the future and under extreme stress.

Their vocabulary expanded to include words they had never even heard of before. They spent hours studying about cancer and its treatments on the internet. The future which had seemed to stretch out endlessly before them, only a few months earlier, was cruely and suddenly cut off by the death of this young wife in 2000 after only 16 years of marriage.

The story could have ended here, but it didn't. This husband has not let the death of his life be in vain. Instead, he has begun a personal crusade to be sure that all the women of his acquaintance hear about the necessity of doing everything possible to prevent cancer, and to get prompt treatment if it does happen to strike in their lives. Of foremost importance he encourages women to be aware of any change in their breasts, to insist on frequent clinical exams beginning as early as age 30, and to have regular mammograms.

Several points were made in the article that were new to me so I thought they added real value to the article in
comparison to other articles I have read about breast cancer.

One was that women whose periods started before they were 12-years old have a greater chance of developing breast cancer, and those who wait until they are over 30 to have their first child also have an increased risk of developing breast cancer.

Most of the other statistics, I had read before, but they are very sobering and should cause any woman reading them to stop and think about her personal cancer prevention program. If you haven't already done so, go back to the first paragraph of this article and click on the link to the article I have referenced. It will be well worth the two or three minutes it will take you to read it, and it might even be responsible for saving your life or the life of someone you love.