Category Archives: Women In Our Book

Financial Help During Breast Cancer Treatment

Contestants line up for "FOX's Next Empire Artist" gold bus to record a song from the show at Campus Martius Park in Detroit , Tuesday, August 4, 2015. The winner will appear as an "Empire" artist during season two.
Molly MacDonald, founder of The Pink Fund, keeps a hectic schedule and works out swimming to balance her life and stay fit. Photo by Kathleen Galligan, “Breast Cancer Surgery and Reconstruction: What’s Right for You” (Rowman & Littlefield).

Molly MacDonald founded The Pink Fund, a metro Detroit non-profit, after experiencing severe financial problems during her breast cancer story.   It provides up to $3,000 for non-medical bills for women during breast cancer treatment. For details and an application: http://www.pinkfund.org

Other Help:

Patient Advocate Organization: http://www.patientadvocate.org/NURD/index2.php?application=underinsured

Komen list http://ww5.komen.org/BreastCancer/FinancialResources.html

Meet Ann Fonfa, Long-Time Metastatic Breast Cancer Survivor

One of the women you will meet in our book’s Flat-Chested, One-Breasted Chapter has lived with Stage 4 breast cancer for 19 years. Here and in the book, she describes her healthy lifestyles that she attributes to her long survivorship. She is an example of the new reality that metastatic breast cancer can be more like a chronic disease than a death sentence. As I like to tell her, Long Live Ann Ann E. Fonfa, founder of the Annie Appleseed Project, the organization through which she educates others with complementary medicine and nutrition advice.

by Ann Fonfa “I was braver than I knew.” I was diagnosed with invasive lobular carcinoma of the left breast after finding a lump in January 1993 while doing my breast self exam. Because I have extr…
BREASTCANCERWELLNESS.ORG

Meet Sara Erzen: A Harrowing Diagnosis During Pregnancy

Sara Erzen of Holt, MI is one of the amazing women telling her story in “Breast Cancer Surgery and Reconstruction: What’s Right for You.” She repeatedly told her ob during pregnancy with her third child that she had suspicious lumps in her breast, finally prevailing, but by then the tumor had become Stage 3, spreading to numerous lymph nodes. She had chemo during pregnant, went on to deliver a healthy baby, then underwent radiation and a single mastectomy with implant reconstruction, only to have it fail. She lives one-breasted, more focus on good health and a good life. Breast cancer is the most common tumor diagnosed during pregnancy, occurring in 1 of every 3,000 women who are pregnant.

at Planet Fitness in Novi, Tuesday, August 13, 2013.  Planet Fitness   Kathleen Galligan/Detroit Free Press
Photo by Kathleen Galligan

MEET DONNA DAUPHINAIS

This is the first in a series of special thanks to women who have been an important part of this book. 

One of the most captivating photos in our book, since repeated on program flyers, is of Donna Dauphinais, a Wayne State University administrator and breast cancer survivor.

Dauphinais has been part of the book from the beginning. Her story inspired author Patricia Anstett to write the book, after traveling with Dauphinais and her mother on a 10-hour road trip so Dauphinais could get nipple tattoos from famed tatoo artist Vinnie Myers. Dauphinais let Anstett watch many of her breast reconstruction procedures. Her story is featured in two chapters: The Nipple, the Ultimate Challenge, and Revisionists. We are grateful to Dauphinais for her openness sharing her story so others can learn.

Donna Dauphinais
Donna Dauphinais

 

 

Markings like these plot where and what plastic surgeons plan to do in breast surgery.
Markings like these plot where and what plastic surgeons plan to do in breast surgery.

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