NO MIRACLE CURES...

It is Breast Cancer awareness month, and the Tory Party are having their conference. David Cameron, their 'man with a plan' to lead Britain into better times, has pledged a 'say no' policy, predicated on a lack of 'miracle cures'.  To what exactly?  Gordon Brown may be a terminally dull and uninspiring leader, but the current parlous state of the economy has a Capitalist cause, its roots not in public spending but in the corporate greed of Cameron's cronies in the City. I fear a return to the 'values' of Thatcherism may prove toxic to the NHS, and to cancer patients in particular, reliant as we are on a tantalising, but increasingly expensive, cocktail of ground-breaking new treatments. 

Take my own treatment, Herceptin. It remains expensive, due perhaps to the monopoly of its developer, Roche Pharmaceuticals. But it is the NHS that has made it widely available to people like myself, an NHS I saw repeatedly holed in its bows by the forces of Thatcher. That was the era when 'private' companies took over the cleaning operations within hospitals. The legacy? MRSA. That was the era that saw repeated cuts to all kinds of services, based on the Iron Lady's sub-Keynesian theory that 'there's no such thing as society.' Margaret Thatcher called open season on any service that was public, rather than private. Hers was the era of the Poll Tax, with residents of Labour Councils (i.e. those dedicated to public spending) paying three times more than Tory bastions, like Westminster, run then by Dame Shirley Cohen, who absconded to Israel rather than pay back the taxpayer the money she had accumulated by selling off public housing and even public cemetaries!  (I was particularly unfortunate with my London Poll tax since my Camden (Labour) flatlet commanded a huge rate;  a mere fifty yards away in Westminster, they paid a mere £80 per year because their Council had no more public services to spend its money on!)  If Labour has messed up these last few years, it is only because it hasn't gone nearly far enough in rebuilding a Welfare State that was systematically dismantled in one short decade of Thatcher cuts and diktats. If Labour hasn't gone far enough to redress this balance by increasing taxation (such as the reintroduction of a supertax on some of the financiers, for instance, who have caused such havoc in the current economy), can we really expect Cameron, Son-of-Thatcher to  help us cancer patients? Don't be fooled by the shiny red cheeks and winning smile. 

In 1979, the first year I was able to vote, I fell for Margaret Thatcher's ralling cry during the Winter of Discontent. ('The British people can't bury their dead..') The great Tony Benn came to speak at my college at London University, and, to my eternal shame (mitigated, perhaps, by my youth and political naivety), I turned my back on him and voted Tory. Fast forward ten years, and the legend 'Third Term, Third Reich' appeared on the bridge at Chalk Farm. Fast forward to an era of greed and sleaze. And tax cuts, sure! 

I don't think I would have been alive today if the Tories had been in government. And, were I still living in Central London, there would probably be no public cemetary left in which to bury me. It's bad enough seeing cancer patients fighting for life-saving/prolonging drugs today.(Even today, the BBC has reported the shocking story of a young breast cancer patient's fight for Avastin.)  Tomorrow, if the Tories get in, I fear the lights will go out for good on the current Cancer Plan. 

A Man with a Plan indeed. We have been warned.

NICE ADVANCED BREAST CANCER DIAGNOSIS AND TREATMENT

HAVE YOUR SAY

The National Institute for Health and Clinical Excellence (NICE), the national organisation responsible for providing national guidance on promoting good health and preventing and treating ill health, is currently developing clinical guidelines on the diagnosis and treatment of both early breast cancer and advanced or metastatic breast cancer. These guidelines will help to shape how breast cancer care is delivered in the next few years and which treatments and care are available.

A draft of the guidelines was recently published and NICE is keen for people affected by breast cancer, or interested in breast cancer issues, to feed in their thoughts about the proposed draft. This is your chance to share your views on services and treatments and help inform a joint response from Breast Cancer Care and Breakthrough Breast Cancer. The charities are working together to develop a response to the guidelines, to help us make sure that our response represents the views and experiences of as many people as possible. The Advanced breast cancer guidelines are particularly important to the work of the Secondary Breast Cancer Taskforce and as members of the Reference Panel we would really like to hear your views on this guidance.

To inform our response, we would like you to complete a questionnaire on the topics outlined in the guidelines. The survey can be completed online at; http://www.surveymonkey.com/s.aspx?sm=5zNiZVqyJ95wSnzllJDy3g_3d_3d.

If you would like to read the draft guidance they can be found here: http://www.nice.org.uk/guidance/index.jsp?action=download&o=41615

The deadline for feedback is Friday 12th September 2008. Please return hard copies of the survey to Chris Quince, Policy and Campaigns Assistant, Breast Cancer Care, 5-13 Great Suffolk Street, London, SE1 0NS.

Please note that all responses will be shared with staff from both charities as part of our joint work on the consultation. However, all responses will remain anonymous.

BOOK RELEASE

COMING SOON....

6th September – PINCUSHION by Anne Morgellyn.

The latest in a series of psychological thrillers that chart the adventures of Louise Moon and her precarious love affair with brilliant but unconventional pathologist, Chas Androssoff.

Performance artist August Stockyard, attention-seeking heir to a media and property empire, dies in typically theatrical fashion, after making the bequest of adjoining houses to his pregnant girlfriend, Cressida, and to his former comrade-in-arms, Louise Moon.

But was August's demise simple suicide or was it the result of a kinky sex game that went wrong? Had he cleverly planned to shame his distant father and take revenge on his ruthless uncle, the obese and grasping millionaire who now had his eye on Louise?

Or was it a game from the grave, pitting Cressida and Louisa in a fight to the death as reluctant and mismatched neighbours?

Excerpt: http://www.bewrite.net/bookshop/excerpts/pincushion.htm
About the Author: http://www.bewrite.net/authors/anne_morgellyn.htm

All BeWrite Books are available from: BeWrite Books, Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Angus & Robertson and other online booksellers and to order from high street bookshops.

Print ISBN: 978-1-905202-82-9
eBook ISBN: 978-1-905202-83-6
Price: £6.99
Pages: 188

ALL ROYALTIES FROM SALES OF THIS BOOK WILL BE DONATED TO BREAST CANCER CARE.

We were healthy

Watched a very moving film about Theriesenstadt yesterday in which a ninety-eight year old Jewish pianist recounted the story of her survival as part of the prisoners' orchestra: We were given black water in the morning, she said, and white water at mid-day, and black water again in the evening, and yet we were healthy. Why? Because we looked forward to playing in the evening.

In the same film, a horrible nexus was drawn between the anti-semitic writings of Wagner and the use of music by the Nazis as a warped cultural tool with which to bludgeon the inmates of the concentration camps. (Primo Levi writes of how he will never get the music of the Lager - those infernal German marching songs, out of his mind.) Wagner believed that Jews had 'corrupted' the music of the Romantic period by their use of minor chords, and that their only hope within German society was to 'go under' (assimilation or annihilation?); yet it was Felix Mendelssohn who resurrected Bach's Matthew Passion! Perhaps this Nazi infiltration of the highest of the arts is an example of how a good impulse can so easily turn to bad - like a cell turning cancerous and setting forth on its interminable death march. For me, though, after watching the film, it was a message from the gods of the power music has to heal, minor chords or not. Beethoven felt it at Heilgenstadt, where it turned his mind from thoughts of suicide to thoughts of transcendence. And how Beethoven transcended! Wow! I was playing the Fifth Symphony - for the first time in years, as part of my current music studies. What a testament to healing that is, and what a powerful force for good.

CO-FUNDING FOR CANCER TREATMENTS

The issue of co-funding, which I understand to mean patients paying for part of their treatment on the NHS, has been much in the news lately. If I sat down and thought long and hard about it, I guess I would have to stick by the original guiding principle of the NHS: that treatment should be freely available to all at point of need. The problem is that it isn't. But should those who can afford to pay for part of their care, such as drugs like Sutent, or the one that's keeping me alive - Herceptin, continue to receive all other procedures, such as scans and bloodtests, free on the NHS? To allow this inevitably suggests a two-tier and therefore unequal system, and to me, as a socialist with a very small sss, that has to be wrong.

On the other hand, imagine (as I can only too well) a scenario where a potentially life-saving drug, trialled and used successfully in other countries, is refused to an NHS patient on grounds of cost. And imagine if that patient could pay for the drug by cobbling together the money for that, but not for all the other procedures. And imagine still further another patient who could afford neither the drug nor the other treatments, but got the other treatments and not the drug that was being bought by the person in the next bed...No, no, no... It's a moral minefield.

Why can't these drugs simply be made cheaper? I understand that there are research costs to recoup on the part of the drugs companies. But why are cancer drugs in Britain VAT rated (like children's shoes for God's sake)? Why are they more expensive here than in other countries in Europe? Why not more freely, more widely available?

All this went through my mind when I was waiting for my recent hysteroscopy down in Penzance, imagining the worst-case scenario of another heavy duty cancer treatment programme, based on the usual nightmarish number of variables (disease location and process, stage, prognosis, treatment options, etc.). The hysteroscopy showed nothing at all (in fact, I quite enjoyed the cosy cottage hospital atmosphere of the day-case ward and my pre-op visit from a charming German anaesthetist, who said he would 'proceed' away from my vocal chords, I having told him my breathing was fine because I sang...). But lying on the CT scanner bed last week, for my 6 month check, I was overcome by the sort of free-floating anxiety that usually assails me at the main hospital, where once you stray outside the oncology areas, you are subject to the usual waiting about and vague air of incompetence. What if, what if, what if...

The cure for that, of course, is life itself. Live it. Seize the day. I drove up over Dartmoor with my daughter last week, relishing the scenery of South Devon, so unlike our scenery in Cornwall, and against which I have always had my Cornish father's prejudices (I'm not a Devon person, was what he used to say - and he always went on about the parlous state of Devon's roads (Conservative mean farmers).  But last week, through my extra rose tinted cancer-survivor's specs, I saw Devon in a different light. Cricket on the lawn at Dartington; the clink of iced champagne glasses at the open air Shakespeare; the sun going down on the English meadows. 

I can understand people wanting to sell all they have to buy more time for that kind of thing. For life.

Ancient Healing

> Click the link below to view the icon of St Panteleimon,
> inspirational healer and martyr.
>
>
>
>

http://www.iconograms.org/B75W90CT
>
>
>
> __________________________________________________________

__________________________________________________________
Not happy with your email address?.
Get the one you really want - millions of new email addresses available now at Yahoo! http://uk.docs.yahoo.com/ymail/new.html

BLOCKED EARS

My ears have been blocked twice this year, once at Christmas, when I managed to unblock them myself with a bottle of Ear-ex; the second time in March, when they were affecting my singing so badly, I decided to go and have them syringed professionally. The nurse who unblocked them was the same nurse who did the Well Woman clinic; and she reminded me that it had been 8 years since I had last been in for a Pap smear. So, duly chastened, I booked myself in for one of those a week later.

To cut a long story short, it came back 'borderline' which, in the normal course of events (i.e had I not had breast cancer), it would have merely been reported but not investigated, other than by a repeat smear 6 months later. Because I take Tamoxifen, however, my GP decided to refer me to the colposcopy clinic at the hospital, where a beady-eyed consultant gynaecologist, Mr Das (what a wonderful name for a gynae guy!) picked it up. A colposcopy exam, he said, would not give him a 'robust enough' result. So he has booked me in as a day surgical case for a hysteroscopy and ultrasound under general anaesthetic. Talk about one thing leading to another...

It turns out that several of my women friends (none of whom has - or has had -  cancer) have had this procedure, some of them several times, either because it didn't work the first time or because findings were inconclusive. My friend Rosie wrote that both her 'procedures' were managed by an 'overwhelmingly arrogant man in a bow tie, who spoke to my left ear.' At least Mr Das looked me in the eye and said he wasn't worried, and it wasn't urgent. But if he wasn't bloody well worried, why book me in for this procedure in the first place?

My friend, Lindsey, to whom I scurried for some emergency reiki and psyching up last week, tells me it's because doctors these days are so afraid of lawsuits, they have to be ultra careful. My brilliant oncologist, who pulled down the smear result on his screen when I reported these unfortunate events to him, said he wasn't worried at all - even when I said Mr Das had seemed unequivocal in his dislike of Tamoxifen. 'You're doing well on it,' Duncan said. 'But if  Mister-Doctor Das wants to take a look, just let him. ' (Pregnant pause.) 'That's not what you wanted to hear, is it?', he went on. Well no, not exactly.  'If he finds anything,' said Duncan, as positive as ever, 'All I'll do is take you off Tamoxifen for a couple of weeks and monitor your hormone levels. And if you need to come off it, I've got other things I can use.'

Why is Mr Das making such a fuss about Tamoxifen? Because, it seems, from what I can make out as fairly inconclusive (and non robust) studies, there is a minor risk of endometrial cancer from prolonged Tamoxifen use - like 10 years. (I have been taking it for three.) More disoncertingly, those women in the studies who did present with endometrial cancer had it already! 

I've been debating with myself whether or not to have this procedure at all. I've just kicked the hospital visits into touch with my excellent Herceptin-at-home treatment, and now Mr Das has mounted a rear-guard action (terrible pun). Lindsey said any biposy - or curettage in this case 'creates a vacuum which has to be filled.' Well, that's one way of looking at it. I am probably due for a clearing out in that department. I was on  repeated courses of antibiotics after my daughter was born, thanks to a tear and lots of stitching up by 2 surgeons, who stared into my nether regions and said they couldn't 'see the apex'. Why is it always men who go into this field of medicine? You'd expect to find more women in gynaecology and obstetrics these days; but not, it seems, here in Truro. Are there an equal number of women, I wonder, treating men with prostate problems? (Bet the answer is a big fat no.) 

Anyway, if it needs looking at, I guess it should be looked at. On the other hand, if it ain't broke, why fix it? And, of course, I have shied away from going to get things checked before - and look where that got me (hairless and breastless.) 

Best get on with it then.