Life Lessons from Melissa

Just minutes after rocker Melissa Etheridge posted notice on her Web site October 8 that she was being treated for breast cancer, her message board was bombarded with hundreds of supportive notes from fans. “Wow, I didn’t see this coming,” the singer responded, writing about her diagnosis on the site. “What an unexpected journey this is.”

In an instant, Etheridge had brought cancer into the nation’s headlines. What impact her diagnosis will have on the health of lesbians remains to be seen, but the news came as a shock, particularly since Etheridge is only 43. (Still recovering from surgery, Etheridge had granted no interviews at press time, but she did approve of the use of her image with this story.)

“Hearing about Melissa’s diagnosis gave me a jolt, as I’m sure it did to a lot of lesbians,” says Alison Bechdel, author of the “Dykes to Watch Out For” comic strip, which features a lesbian character with breast cancer. “I think we tend to be pretty much in denial about breast cancer until it touches our lives directly. Even among the out activist lesbians I know who are very educated about breast cancer and prevention, it’s a threatening topic. So I think the fact that everyone knows Melissa will definitely get us talking more and, hopefully, dissipate the fear and denial a little bit.”

Adding to many lesbians’ fears is the fact that they’ve come to believe their risk of developing breast cancer is much greater than that of heterosexual women. It is true that studies have found that some risk factors for breast cancer—such as being overweight, smoking, and not having given birth or breast-fed—are more common among lesbians. But a recent study that compared differences in risk factors between lesbians and their heterosexual sisters did not find much disparity at all.

“What we found was that the risk was about 1% higher in lesbians,” says Suzanne Dibble, cofounder of the Lesbian Health Research Center at the University of California, San Francisco, and a lead researcher on the study. But even if the risk is higher, that doesn’t mean more lesbians will get breast cancer, she notes. Women with many breast cancer risk factors don’t always get the disease, while some women who have none of the known risk factors do.

Noelle Mayhew was diagnosed with breast cancer in July 1999 at age 32 and “was totally blown away,” she says. Mayhew had gone to see her doctor after she began experiencing pain in her right breast and “thought of cancer as an old ladies’ disease. Also, when you hear ‘cancer,’ the first thing you think is, I’m going to die.”

Following her diagnosis, Mayhew had a modified radical mastectomy followed by chemotherapy and radiation. Over the next several years it appeared her cancer was gone. Then in May she learned that the cancer had returned and spread throughout her body. But even that news hasn’t dampened her spirit. Mayhew, who is a buyer for an arts and crafts paper store, is grateful for the support of her family and friends. In fact, on the day that she spoke to The Advocate, her mother threw her a surprise party at work. She mentions that she is single but is dating. And she’s now in an 18-month clinical trial that is designed specifically for women with metastatic disease that is testing a new way to treat cancer. She says, “I don’t plan on going anywhere.”

“You have breast cancer” are undoubtedly four of the scariest words a woman can hear from her doctor. And about 216,000 women in the United States will receive that news in 2004. All women are at risk of developing breast cancer; statistics indicate that the older a woman gets, the greater her chance of developing the disease. Approximately 77% of incidences of breast cancer occur in women 50 and over. It is estimated that 40,110 U.S. women will die of the disease this year.

“We need to get lesbians into routine screening because when a woman is diagnosed early her chances of surviving are much higher,” says Ellen Kahn, director of the Lesbian Services Program at the Whitman-Walker Clinic in Washington, D.C. “At this point, everyone knows someone who has or has had breast cancer. It’s not a foreign or intangible reality. Yet there remain lots of personal reasons why folks delay mammograms or don’t do breast self-exams.”

The good news is that more women are now being diagnosed early, when the disease is more easily treatable; options for treatment have improved; and many more women survive breast cancer than die from it.

“We cure two thirds of breast cancer,” says openly gay breast surgeon and women’s health activist Susan Love. “And when I say ‘cure,’ I mean that most women who have had breast cancer will not die from it. Further, even once breast cancer has spread to other parts of the body, women can live for a long time with the disease.

“There has been more research on breast cancer than probably any other cancer,” Love continues, “and that, in part, is thanks to the efforts of many women. We’ve made a lot of progress in treating breast cancer, but what we really need to learn how to do now is to prevent breast cancer from happening.”