There are no lumps, and it won't show up on a mammagram.
Symptoms of Inflammatory Breast Cancer
* Rapid increase in breast size
* Redness
* Skin hot to the touch
* Persistent itching
* Thickening of breast tissue
For more information click here.
Thanks to my dear brother Protium for a heads up on this!
7 comments:
Doesn't look like fun at all. Hope you or anyone else doesn't have to go though the ordeal. Thanks Protium for been a great brother and looking after Fiery. You should adopt me too. :)
Yikes. IBC constitutes about 6% of all female breast cancers. That amounts to 11,000 new cases in America each year (see below). That is nothing to sneeze at, given its mortality rate.
From the CNN web site's Health pages:
"Historically, inflammatory breast cancer was treated by surgery and was associated with a 100 percent mortality rate. However, significant progress has been made in recent years using a combination of treatments, including chemotherapy, surgery and radiation therapy. The combined-treatment approach has vastly improved the prognosis for a woman with inflammatory breast cancer. What was once universally fatal is now a disease that results in half of women diagnosed being alive in five years and one-third of women diagnosed surviving 10 or more years."
Men can get breast cancer too, but they constitute only ~1% of all breast cancer cases.
From this web site:
"Male breast cancer remains rare. According to the National Cancer Institute (NCI), it accounts for less than one percent of all breast cancer cases. NCI data show that about 1,990 men are diagnosed each year, and the disease will kill about 23 percent of them. That's compared to about 182,460 new diagnoses a year in women and more than 40,000 deaths.
Breast cancer tends to strike men over 60, but those who are decades younger can get it as well. In addition to family history and age, risk factors include elevated body weight; exposure to radiation; taking estrogen as part of a sex change; liver disease, which can cause an increase in men's estrogen levels; hormonal disorders or the use of medications containing hormones; and Klinefelter's syndrome, a congenital disorder that causes hormonal imbalances and infertility in men."
Exposure to gasoline also increases one's risk. Protium is going to have to stop sucking on the hose he uses for siphoning gas! Yes, even Canadians know, Protium! ;-)
Thanks for this! I had no idea! I always laugh at the "Feel-You-Up" Bus parked in the parking lot at work. It's a mobile mamogram service. I might consider it next time they come around.
Protium is a wonderful brother! You are very lucky to have such wonderful friends!
Hope you have a great week!
Hugs!!
Wow. I JUST now clicked over here after looking at punkrockmommy's site to see how her family was faring after her death from IBC.
It's an interesting chronicle of her life from the time that she was diagnosed until the time she died at her home with the help of hospice.
She was religious, so you can take whatever with a grain of salt, but it's still an interesting read about what it is like to deal with this disease.
http://www.punkrockmommy.org/
HalfRabbit- I definitely consider myself very fortunate to know both Protium and Thump.
Richard- Makes sense that men can get breast cancer as they have the bits as well, but something that I've never really thought of. Good reason to feel your man up I suppose. Are men with moobs more susceptible then buff men?
Pink- HI! :) Nice to have you back. Cancer is such a horrid illness. There is nothing fair or just about it and rarely are the bastards of the world struck down by it. For example- chances of the Pope getting IBC are slim to nun. *snerk* NUN!!!! MWAHAHAHAHA.
*ahem*
Several months ago I was tripping around the web and found a blog and then another about women that were just diagnosed with IBC and I had never heard of it. I called my bff and told her about it and she had never heard of it. 3 days later one of her friends was diagnosed. I claimed it was not my fault...
I am 38 and have a great interest in things medical and have taken some science/medical type classes....and I am scared that I had never heard of it......what else don't I know...?
Hound Doggy,
I have a few years on you (actually 19), and you can bet that "not knowing" is far worse than you can imagine.
Ayn Rand said that a man cannot really think philosophically until he is at least 40 years old. Yep, it takes that long to grasp the full extent of things in the world, to grasp how little one really knows.
Knowing, is not a matter of grasping eigenvectors in factorial analyses, or whether the Armenians really suffered genocide at the hands of the Turkish, or other minutia of a particular field. It is a matter of grasping the real principles of human living.
To live, you need to know those principles so intimately that they have all the immediacy, and sharp relevance, of smashing one's thumb with a hammer!
You do not know about IBC? Hmmm... WHY didn't school prepare you enough to know? Why do you not learn these things from the media? How would you be able to have a life that lets you acquire such information? What kind of culture would make it possible? Why are medical advances slowing? Why are kids graduating without being able to read!? What foul principles, operating in your culture, make it unlikely that you would learn of these things?
Why doesn't your doctor follow numerous, well-known health parameters, from the day you were born, so that he/you could detect when things in your body are going awry, long before you are sickened? (Yes, that is possible, but not available!)
Medicine is just one example. What about ...Hmmm... education? Who chooses what matters, and why is it the same across the entire nation?
Wait... a few people decide for the entire nation? What if those few screw up? Clearly, everyone suffers. Is that an indictment of centralized education? You bet!
What about centralized banking? What about centralized land management (EPA)? What about centralized medicine? ...What? You Americans do not have that yet? ...it's coming! All you have to do is vote Obama or McCain. Nice options, n'est-ce pas?
I'm Canadian, and I watch as beds in hospitals here disappear, and as the wards become storage rooms, and as stroke and heart attack patients die on gurneys in hospital hallways. "Cause of death"? Why, stroke or heart attack, of course... they're not listed as "waiting for treatment due to socialized medicine!"
America is "a Republic", —based on Individual Rights to Life, Liberty, Property and the Pursuit of Happiness— said Franklin, "if you can keep it".
I guess that's over, you stupid American bastards (with some exceptions).
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