Hug Everyone You Know: A Year of Community, Courage, and Cancer, published by She Writes Press, is a memoir about how Antoinette Truglio Martin found the courage to navigate her first year of breast cancer treatment. It’s the story of how a community—colleagues, family, friends—rallied to support her. The book is moving, brave, informative, and occasionally funny—and it speaks to us all. I turned to journaling when my son was diagnosed with bipolar disorder and after his suicide death. The page became a healing balm for me. Eventually I included those journal entries in my memoir, Leaving the Hall Light On: A Mother's Memoir of Living with Her Son's Suicide and Surviving His Suicide. Like Antoinette, my writing kept me calm and focused. Here is her essay on how she benefitted from writing in her journals and emailing her community after her cancer diagnosis. How Writing Calms the Nerves by Antoinette Truglio Martin I don’t run. I don’t sit still long enough to mind my … [Read more...]
National Breast Cancer Awareness Month
In honor of National Breast Cancer Awareness Month I'd like to tell you my breast story. Thankfully, I finally got a clean bill of health from the Cedars Sinai Medical Breast Center radiologist yesterday after almost three years of mammograms, ultrasounds, and breast tests. This regime started because of 2009 mammogram results at Torrance Memorial Breast Diagnostic Center and their assessment that I needed a needle biopsy on two points on my left breast. The Torrance Memorial finding of two three to four milligram nodules in the central to lateral left breast said that simultaneous palpation and scanning revealed no significant abnormality in the left axilla. The assessment was termed suspicious and given a breast imaging reporting and data system category of Bi-Rad 4a, for a low suspicion of breast malignancy. The chance of finding real cancer at this level is twenty to forty percent. I was wary from the start. I didn't know this new doctor at Torrance who evaluated my … [Read more...]
