By Diane Strandberg - The Tri-City News
Jun 04 2005

 

A Port Coquitlam non-profit society wants Tri-City women to check their breasts for lumps as often as they cut their hair or do their nails.
And a four-hour session with the Amberheart Breast Cancer Foundation will show them how.
"It's difficult, very difficult to detect lumps," says Tad Slubowski, foundation president, who is qualified to practise medicine in Poland and was a cancer researcher at the University of Warsaw.
Slubowski has developed the course to explain the risks of breast cancer and how monthly breast self exams (BSE) can lead to early detection and prevent the spread of cancer to lymphatic nodes or other organs.
His daughter, Angie, a 1998 Riverside secondary school graduate who recently completed her masters degree in international relations, helps teach the course and demonstrates for women a three-stage massage technique. This technique takes 10 minutes and is critical because it can help women detect changes in their breasts over time, she says.
"You have to know your breast," Angie Slubowski said, "and by doing it every month, if you do find something you didn't find last month, you can get it checked out."
She recently returned from Poland, where she worked for the Polish branch of Amberheart, which teaches nurses how to do breast exams on patients. The society got grants, including one from Avon Cosmetics Poland, to train 140 community nurses, the main source of medical help in rural areas. Since the society was established six years ago, 15,000 women in 100 health care centres have received exams and 6,000 got coupons for free mammographies when problems were found. Sixty thousand brochures on breast cancer prevention were also distributed.
By making breast cancer information more available, Amberheart hopes to encourage Polish women to take better care of themselves and seek help if they need it, she said.
Back in Port Coquitlam, Angie, with the support of her father, who runs a bio-tech lab making pharmaceuticals, is making similar information available to Tri-City women. The training program for nurses has been condensed to a four-hour session so women can learn to do breast exams on themselves.
While controversy remains on the benefits of breast exams and mammographies in reducing cancer deaths, Tad Slubowski says BSE are still valuable when done in conjunction with yearly medical exams and mammographies available to women over 40.
"For women between the ages of 20 and 40, there is a period between the age of when mammography starts and something may happen," he said, noting BSE are particularly important for women with a family history of breast cancer but no one is immune.
Why breast cancer occurs is not clearly understood - diet, exercise and the environment can all have an impact - but "cancer is striking younger and younger women," he said.
The course costs $55, and includes a CD that shows how to do breast self exams, medical information on the importance of self exams, who is at risk and how to reduce those risks. The course kit also contains a necklace that uses different-sized beads to compare a tumour found accidentally (roughly the size of a golf ball) to those found through regular monthly breast exams (the size of a blueberry). Even a blueberry-sized tumour can contain hundreds of thousands of cancer cells, said Tad Slubowski. "That why it's important to catch it early," he said. "Those cells don't just double, triple or quadruple, they grow exponentially."
Amberheart's first course locally is June 18. For more information, call 604-942-3569 or go to www.amberheart.net. Sponsors are also welcome to help with administration costs and reduce course fees. Tax receipts are available for donations.