Breast Cancer: Taking Control

Using the familiar image of a garden and a personal, plain English style to illustrate your cancer and how it affects your body, Professor Boyages, MD, PhD, walks you slowly through the stress and confusion after a diagnosis of breast cancer.

Some key features:

• “Traffic-light” colours guide you through treatment phases
• 20 color-coded “Control Points” with detailed flow charts
• Clear end of chapter “Warning”, “Tip” and “Remember” icons and summaries
• 15 real-life patient stories
• Plain English style with garden and other analogies to explain your breast cancer and its treatment
• 125 photographs in full color
• 28 graphically designed diagrams
• 75 hand-picked web links
• Detailed glossary, key references and index

Learn how to:

1. Identify the 20 “Control Points”: the 20 important decisions you need to make before and after your surgery
2. Navigate through the medical maze of breast cancer treatment with detailed descriptions and clear flowcharts that give you a “birds-eye view” of the process.
3. Find and research the right treatment team for you
4. Identify the key questions to ask your treatment team before and after treatment
5. Identify the surgical choices for your breast and armpit
6. Understand when you really need radiation therapy, chemotherapy or hormonal treatment
7. Preserve your fertility
8. Understand ways of helping to cope with sexuality and early menopause after treatment

Note from the author

“Let me lead you down the right path for you to get you on top and “take control” of this all too common disease.” Professor John Boyages, MD, PhD

Foreword

The diagnosis of breast cancer is devastating. Following a diagnosis, many people today turn to the internet to get answers before they see their doctor, but resources on the web are scattered and often inaccurate or unhelpful.

At long last, a breast cancer expert has written a book that focuses on what a patient needs to know at the point of diagnosis.

Breast Cancer: Taking Control takes you through all the critical decision points after a diagnosis in a personal, plain English style, and in one place gives you all the information you need. John Boyages completed a fellowship with me at the Dana Farber Cancer Institute in 1988, and since then, I have been proud to watch him become one of the world’s all-around experts about this complex disease. In this book, John takes you through the treatment journey with empathy, care, and common sense and gives hope and power back to the reader to let them regain control when life seems suddenly so out of control.

– Jay R. Harris,
MD Professor, Department of Radiation Oncology,
Harvard Medical School Chief, Radiation Oncology Department, Dana-Farber Cancer Institute