Melissa Etheridge
is now one of thousands of lesbians battling breast
cancer. A special report from the women and researchers on
the front lines.
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.”
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Rochman is a freelance writer based in San Francisco and
medical editor for www.susanlovemd.org.