My friend has been asked by her place of worship to do a little talk about what she's thankful for for a special Thanksgiving service. As we were talking about it while walking our dogs before work this morning, I asked her what she was going to talk about. She said, "The thing I'm most thankful for is my brother's breast cancer, so that's what I'm going to focus it on."
Huh? Her brother was diagnosed back in '99, and the cancer has since spread to his spine and lungs--what's so great about that? She said that not only had it brought her family closer together than they had ever been, but it also opened the eyes of her brother's oncologist, who had never encountered male breast cancer before. He has since become downright evangelical about spreading the word to his colleagues, and it's rippling out from there. "Thanks to him, hundreds of doctors in Michigan now know to look for it in their male patients," she said.
A personal request: If you do any breast-cancer-related CME, please ask your faculty to include that it's not for women only. It might be too late to help Greg, but it could save another man's life. For this, we all would be very thankful.
