They All Matter Let's Find The Cure Blog Hop

Hi everyone!  Welcome to my blog and the They All Matter Let's Find The Cure Blog Hop!

This hop is more to serve as awareness for all the cancers.  Some blogs may have projects while others may just have information.  We hope you will take the time to reach each blog post.

If you are just coming from Lisa's blog, you are in the right place.  If you just came across my blog and would like to hop along, please start at the beginning with Lisa.

So I decided to work with Breast Cancer...

As some of you know, my mommom was diagnosed with Breast Cancer earlier this year.  It was devastating since there has never been a history of Breast Cancer in our family.  Thank goodness my mommom gives herself a breast check or we would have never known that something was wrong.  She does get a mammogram every year but her next scheduled one wasn't for another few months.

Because she caught it early, she had a partial mastectomy and went for 32 treatments of radiation.  Chemotherapy was not an option because of her age, her heart and medications because of her heart.  Treatments went very well as I was the one that took her everyday.  Her skin burned only slightly and she healed very nicely.  Of course mommom's nerves were shot so she made my mom and I go for mammograms (I'm only 29 but because of the history now she wanted to make sure I get screened regularly).  Slowly I'm getting healthy and taking preventative measures against Breast Cancer.

I wanted to share the banner that I created for her...she wanted a countdown for when she was finished treatments.  Each of the family members wrote on the ribbons either a joke or words of encouragement.  Each day she would come home and tear off a ribbon.  The banner still hangs in the kitchen but there are no ribbons :)

Here are a few things...

*Get a yearly mammogram.  The earlier detection the better.  Have a mammogram every year starting at age 40 if you are at average risk and have a mammogram at least every 3 years starting at age 20.

*Exercise.  Research shows exercising regularly at a moderate or intense level for 4 to 7 hours per week lowers the risk of breast cancer.

*Don't drink.  Research consistently shows that drinking alcoholic beverages, beer, wine, and liquor, increases a woman's risk of hormone-receptor-positive breast cancer.

Obviously those are some very basic, obvious things to get/stay healthy and take some preventative measures against Breast Cancer.  There are a lot of helpful and supportive websites...

http://www.breastcancer.org/

and

http://ww5.komen.org/

These are just to name a few, there are several more.

We hope that you enjoy this awareness hop.

Your next stop is Pam's Blog!