Celebrities and Cancer

Today Giuliana Rancic, star of E! News, announced that she has breast cancer.  She certainly isn't the first celebrity to go public with this disease, and sadly, I'm sure, won't be the last.  I, however, am much more interested in this announcement than I would have been a year ago.  There is something almost vindicating for me when a young, beautiful, skinny, celebrity announces that she is fighting the same fight that I am.  I have to admit, that despite the fact that I intellectually know better, I still blame myself for this disease.  Crazy?  Yes, I do realize that.  Unfortunately though much of the research out there today tells me that overweight women have a higher risk of breast cancer, particularly the type that I have (triple negative).  And it is very human, or at least womanly, to take any small thing that you can use as fault, and run with it.  So when I see someone who clearly did not get this disease for that reason, it helps me a tiny bit, believe that maybe it isn't my fault.

My heart breaks for Giuliana and her family.  She has been trying to have a baby for a couple of years now and discovered her cancer prior to her third attempt at IVF.  Gratefully they were already only a week out from her egg retrieval when the diagnosis was made, so she will still have the opportunity to have a child once she is cancer free.  I will be watching to see what the details are about her process as she joins this club that no one wants to be a part of.  She has already announced that she will have surgery and then radiation.  I'm curious to know what type of breast cancer she has that allows this particular treatment plan.  I'm sure part of the reasoning is her public life, and how damaging chemo would be to that, but seriously, if it was her life, no good doctor would encourage that.  She isn't talking about hormone therapy either though, which would delay her ability to have babies another 5 years.  So we will see!  Probably not that interesting to the rest of you, but at this point, every time another public figure is diagnosed, that much more attention and money will be given to this disease, which makes all of us closer to a cure.