Let’s take a stand against breast cancer

One of the things that strikes me the hardest some days involves the news I read in which a person I tended to admire as a child passed away. From my perspective, that news hits me unexpectedly since I didn’t know these actors, actresses, singers and other celebrities faced a battle against various diseases, including cancer.

Among those celebrities included Olivia Newton-John, whose music was something I enjoyed listening to during my youth. Sadly, she passed away in 2022 following her long battle against breast cancer.

It’s this same cancer that claimed the life of actress Suzanne Somers from the television comedy "Three's Company" a year later. The news reports I read once the news broke regarding her passing came after the breast cancer she fought had spread to the other organs in her body.

It’s this form of cancer and others like it that launched efforts in recent years to spread the word around the world as part of an ongoing effort to identify, fight and eventually eliminate these dreaded diseases once and for all. This includes Breast Cancer Awareness Month that began Oct. 1 as a way to help people take this information to heart.

Consider this. Over the past 50 years, humanity took tremendous steps forward in terms of diagnosing people with breast cancer in addition to helping destroy that disease.

If you stop and think about it, anyone with a cancer diagnosis a half century ago often meant they had no hope of surviving and their days were numbered.

Back then, the disease was going to kill them. It was only a matter of how much time they had left.

However, jump ahead to today and see what changed. According to the National Cancer Society, the odds of surviving breast cancer remain significantly better today than they were 50 years ago thanks to advances in early screening methods, better surgical techniques and more effective treatments, including chemotherapy and hormonal therapy.

In Mountain Home alone, we gained new resources that aim to help improve the odds of detecting this disease well in advance. In May, we celebrated the addition of the new breast health mobile clinic, which provides St. Luke’s Elmore Medical Center with enhanced three-dimensional mammogram screenings for its patients.

It’s this technology that helped protect people like Lori Bott from this form of cancer. This 3D mammography equipment caught that tumor when it measured just 1.1 centimeters in size.

Doctors caught this type of cancer well before it reached the stage when that tumor could’ve grown to the point where she would’ve needed more “intensive” forms of treatment to eliminate this threat to her body.

According to information from the American Cancer Society, those screening tests have greatly helped women, especially those ages 50 and up where the disease was more common.

However, we can’t lose sight of the fact that people will still face the reality of dealing with this form of cancer. In the United States alone, that includes an estimated 317,000 women and nearly 3,000 men.

Excluding cancers of the skin, breast cancer remains the most common cancer among women in this country and accounts for 29 percent of newly diagnosed forms of cancer. In terms of how many it kills each year, breast cancer is second only to lung cancer in terms of cancer-related deaths in women, the cancer society reported.

But out of these grim statistics there is some optimistic news to report. There are currently more than 3.1 million women in America with a history of breast cancer that are still with us. Some of these women remain cancer-free while others still have evidence of cancer and continue to undergo treatment.

As I have mentioned before when I've discussed this topic, cancer plays no favorites and doesn't care who you are, how much money you make and how old you might be. It's afflicted people like former Good Morning America co-host Joan Lunden, who had it detected early during her annual mammogram in June 2014.

Fourteen months later, actress Shannen Doherty confirmed she was also being treated for breast cancer. In her case, however, there were reports that it was detected late due to issues with her health care coverage, and her prognosis seemed less-than-optimistic.

While Doherty saw a period of remission, the cancer returned as stage 4 and had spread to her brain and bones before her death on July 13, 2024.

Here's something else for you to consider. While the name might indicate otherwise, breast cancer isn't limited to affecting only women.

While the percentage of cases is significantly lower, the disease also affects men. Among the well-known male survivors of the disease is Peter Criss, the former drummer for the heavy metal band KISS. In 2007, he first noticed a lump in his left breast, which subsequent tests confirmed that it was cancerous.

In a subsequent interview two years later, he considered himself "the luckiest man on the planet." He was now a cancer survivor.

Other male breast cancer patients were not so fortunate. Famed television announcer Robert Ray Roddy, whose name you might remember from the classic game show The Price Is Right, lost his battle against the disease in 2003 two years after he was diagnosed with colon cancer, which had spread throughout his body.

But for every person we lose to this type of disease, I take some comfort in knowing many others remain survivors. It's their stories we should turn to whenever we feel that all hope is lost, because we know that's not necessarily the case.

I can only hope some day that we will finally find a cure for breast disease in addition to all forms of cancer. It's my sincere hope that people will no longer have to endure the pain of having to fight cancer and that their families no longer have to deal with the different type of pain they also carry.

For those unsure whether they need to get a mammogram, let me offer some words of advice I recently learned from someone with far more experience dealing with cancer: Take a mom, take a friend, take a sister, take a buddy. Whatever you do, just go. Never say "no."