Mastectomy

LONDON -- Britain's chief medical officer has told doctors that they can continue to use silicone gel breast implants despite a temporary suspension of the procedure in the United States.Last month, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration recommended a 45-day moratorium on the supply or use of silicone gel implants while new information questioning their safety is evaluated. Concerns focus on the possibility of reactions in the immune system caused by a leakage of silicone."I understand the concerns and anxiety felt by women over silicone gel breast implants," said Dr. Kenneth Calman, the Department of Health's chief medical officer.

WASHINGTON -- The Senate duel over regulating health care got off to an emotional start last night as Republicans blocked a series of Democratic efforts to broaden coverage for managed-care patients.With only a handful of Republican defections, the Senate rejected proposals to give women greater access to gynecological care and to guarantee overnight hospital stays after a mastectomy.Proposals to expand the definition of emergency room care and to require insurance companies to pay for treatments that doctors determine are medically necessary were also rejected.

JERRI NIELSEN FITZGERALD, 57 South Pole doctor treated her own cancer Jerri Nielsen FitzGerald, who diagnosed and treated her own breast cancer before a dramatic rescue from the South Pole, died Tuesday at her home in Southwick, Mass. Her cancer had been in remission until it returned in August 2005. She was the only doctor among 41 staff at the National Science Foundation's Amundsen-Scott South Pole Station in winter 1999 when she discovered a lump in her breast. Because of the extreme weather conditions, the station is closed to the outside world for the winter.

William Lambert,78, an investigative journalist who won his second Pulitzer Prize for a Life magazine report that led to the resignation of U.S. Supreme Court justice Abe Fortas, died Sunday in Philadelphia. He was considered a pioneer of modern investigative journalism, topping his career with news reports that helped compel Mr. Fortas to resign in 1969. His story said the justice had taken $20,000 in 1966 from stock swindler Louis Wolfson while serving on the bench. Mr. Fortas resigned nine days after the story was published.

For years, Dr. Susan Love was an "army of one," urging medical science to focus on the cause of breast cancer instead of its treatment, on women instead of laboratory mice. Today, thanks to efforts of the best-known breast cancer advocate, there is an "Army of Women" — women (and men) volunteers who have signed up online to participate in studies that might find the answer to a stubborn cancer that claims almost as many women's lives today as it did 30 years ago. Every year, an estimated 200,000 women will be diagnosed with breast cancer in the United States, and 40,000 will die. Love will return Friday to the College of Notre Dame, where she was once an undergraduate pre-med student, on a recruiting trip.

Sculptor Nancy Fried stands before a small crowd of students at Goucher College, ready to talk about her art. Which means she's ready to talk about herself.Click. Fried shows a slide of two women in a flamboyantly decorated bathroom, one is bathing while the other stands near the tub. "Don't you love baths?" Fried asks the audience."It's interesting that the two women are not in the bath tub together." Perhaps, she ponders aloud, her art was trying to tell her something. Fried was the model for the woman in the bathtub.

Early Monday morning, Lillie Shockney bustles around the outpatient clinic of the Johns Hopkins Breast Center, signing up colleagues to enter the Susan G. Komen Race for the Cure for Breast Cancer.It's the start of a typical 18-hour day for the center's 45-year-old director of education and outreach, a day of juggling media interviews and departmental matters, of hearing about new types of breast prostheses, of agreeing to give lectures that will pour money into breast cancer support groups, of comforting an elderly woman before and after her mastectomy.

Because her mother underwent a mastectomy at 75 and her sister died of breast cancer at 42, a Baltimore woman decided to err on the safe side: She had both her breasts removed before the disease -- if she had it -- could grow. The gamble paid off the day she left the hospital when her doctor handed her a pathology report showing a pre-cancerous growth.Now a test for gene alterations that cause breast cancer is available for the first time, and this woman's daughters can make such crucial decisions with more certainty than she did seven years ago. But the mother fears a Catch 22. If a genetic test shows her daughters inherited a faulty gene, a health insurer could call it a pre-existing condition and refuse to pay for subsequent treatment.

Growing up in Bethesda, Giuliana Rancic thought there was nothing more glamorous than the news women she saw on TV. First at the University of Maryland, College Park, then at graduate school in Washington, she trained to join their ranks, heading with mike and camera to the White House, Pentagon and Capitol Hill. But there was a problem. "I couldn't bring myself to report the news straight," Rancic remembers. "I liked asking senators not just, what do you think of a policy, but what do you do for fun, what's your favorite movie.

How many children have you had, and did you wait until after 30 to have the first one? Do you have more than one drink a day? Did you get your period before you were 12? Do you exercise? Have a low-fat, high-fiber diet? Did you breast-feed? Do you work nights, wear a bra, have breast implants, use the Pill or wear antiperspirant? Do you smoke? Did your mother, your aunts or your sisters have breast cancer ? Do you have the breast cancer gene? Do you want to know if you have the breast cancer gene?