Someone close to me recently had a battle with breast cancer, her second such encounter, and overcame it with the help of science. She had a terrible time while these battles were going on though, often encountering nausea because of the ch
emotherapy and going through vicious other side effects from all the treatments. Thankfully she made it through just fine. Now the other concern of course is how it'll affect her daughters. Thankfully, medical innovations have now made it so that you can test to see if you have a gene that will be passed on to see if your relatives will get cancer. Again thankfully, her daughters are not at risk.
Jessica Queller, a TV writer, was faced with a situation similar to the one above. Sadly, her mother passed away as a result of ovarian cancer after also battling breast cancer, and Queller was found to have the gene that causes both, making her susceptible to one day coming down with one or both of the cancers. So Queller was faced with a tough decision -- get a mastectomy and have your ovaries removed now to ensure you won't contract cancer in the future in those areas or not get the surgeries and have children, like she had always envisioned. Jessica decided to get artificially inseminated, then afterwards have her ovaries removed and get a mastectomy afterwards.
It's a terrible dilemma to have to decipher and I don't know which way I would turn if I were her. She said that plastic surgery has made it bearable and she's "been put back together beautifully". I love that we can now see how susceptible women are to cancers and can thus take preventative steps such as these and admire her for being able to make such a tough decision.
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