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BRCA genes, Breast Cancer Treatment, Diagnosis, Gene Patenting, Mastectomy, Myriad Genetics, preventive mastectomy
so who owns your genes, Angelina?
Actress Angelina Jolie has made very public her personal and medical choice to undergo a preventive double mastectomy. Untold millions now know about her family history of breast cancer that robbed her of her mother, young at 56, and the mutation of the BRCA1 gene that led her to choose preventive mastectomies. Doing so reduced her risk of developing breast cancer from 87% to under 5%. All told, Jolie is happy with her decision and offers a positive account of a major surgical procedure – an amputation – that she describes as relatively simple with normal life resuming after only a few days. Her scars are minimal, the results “beautiful,” and her femininity…
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Memoir, Mother Daughter Relationship, Mother's Day, Ordinary Things, Poetry, Seamus Heaney, Themes of Childhood
seamus heaney & a dance for mother’s day
This Mother’s Day in America finds me thinking about my mother back in Castledawson, County Derry, a great armful of sheets rescued from the clothes-line before the rain begins to fall. Then, the folding, a precise ritual, my father her partner in a dance handed down from one generation to the next. My daughter learned those same moves not by the ironing board in my mother’s kitchen, but before the fog rolled in on the end of a windy afternoon on the sandy edges of California. Folding our beach blanket, edge to edge, while unbeknownst to us, my husband took photographs and wrote our names in the sand . . . …
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Arizona, Artisans, Crafts, Fosterling, Lewis Hyde, Memoir, Memoir, Mother's Day, Ordinary Things, Phoenix, Seamus Heaney, Writing
little marvels on mother’s day in america . . .
In a special for CNBC, Anna Andrianova shares the National Retail Federation’s estimate that $20.7 billion will be spent next Sunday, Mother’s Day in America. How easily that number rolls off the tongue – twenty-point-seven-billion-dollars – but what does it mean? A lot, of course. Years ago, I told my students to avoid using “a lot” in their compositions, because it was too vague. “A lot” of money to, say, Oprah or Donald Trump, is something altogether different from “a lot” of money in my wallet, the latter implying I remembered to bring cash for parking or I happened upon the hundred-dollar bill I once hid between two wallet-size photographs, knowing I would…
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Blogging, Breast Cancer Awareness Month, Culture of breast cancer, Diagnosis, Doris Kearns Goodwin, Facebook, Family, Hair, Jackson Browne, Language of Cancer, Little Feat, Lowell George, Memoir, Memoir, Memory, Mother Daughter Relationship, Music, Pink Ribbons, Sherman Alexie, Social Media, Soundtracks of our Lives, television, Van Morrison, Writers, Writing
breaking bad news & long distance love
Yesterday, I discovered Rendezvous, “a digital meeting place for the globally engaged, hosted by the International Herald Tribune.” As such, Rendezvous is a global tribe seeking “to inspire international discussion and intelligent debate that enlivens the global conversation.” Sounds like the perfect place for members of the Irish diaspora, scattered far and wide across the globe. People like me. While my circumstances were different from my grandparents and so many irish before me, who were obliged to leave home because of famine or poverty, or diminished possibilities and broken promises, I can barely remember a time when I did not harbor a desire to come to America, eager to take what Doris…
