"Once before we went to sleep my husband reached to caress my missing breast- I felt him cringe and he slowly withdrew his hand, hoping I had not noticed. Having done so once, he never forgot again. I learn more slowly. Whenever I run up the stairs my hands instinctively fly toward my chest- forgetting, after all this time, there is no need to steady breasts that lie on the cutting room floor." This is the life of a breast cancer survivor, Lois Tschetter Hjelmstad, she wrote this poem entitled "Force of Habit" in March of 1993. (Eikenberry 78) Breast Cancer, the number two leading cause of death among women, takes over 44,000 American women's lives alone, each year. Another quote by Christina Middlebrook explains more of the shocking diagnosis of breast cancer in her story, "Sailing", "Cancer will kill me. It will sneak up on me, make microscopic but lethal invasions into tiny parts of my body without my even knowing it. And as it happens, I will be looking healthy." (Eikenberry 153) Many times women feel perplexed when they are informed of their breast cancer, because it may not effect them at the time it entered their body, it usually takes much longer before the symptoms are noticed. .
In the beginning many women are confused with their diagnosis, and ask a common question, what has gone wrong? The breast is a mammary gland designed to .
Zeigler .
produce milk for offspring. Within the breast there are many components. One is the nipple which is in the center of the breast and changes during pregnancy and lactation becoming larger and darker in color. (Hirshaut and Pressman 30) Another section is the areola or pigmented skin around the nipple. There are also sacs lined with cells that can produce milk called acini. They cluster together to form lobules which empty into ducts that can carry milk to the nipple. These groups of lobules that empty into one duct are called a lobe.
