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Cancer survivor sounds a warning
Kim Davies wants to spread the word to take early warnings very seriously, and that mastectomy will save your life, not ruin it.
By AMY ABBOTT
© St. Petersburg Times, published September 28, 2000
It's just a warning sign.
That's what doctors told Kim Davies about the abnormal cells they found in her breasts. In the medical world, that warning sign has a title: lobular carcinoma in situ.
What Davies wants you to know in her new book, Me, Amazon Woman. LCIS Breast Cancer: The Controversy, is that it is a precursor of cancer. It means you may not get cancer for a few more months, maybe a few more years, but you will get cancer sometime. LCIS is usually simultaneously present in both breasts.
What doctors will tell you is LCIS is premalignant and not a true cancer. It increases a woman's risk of getting breast cancer by seven times. It is one of the most elusive diseases, since it usually doesn't show up in mammograms or standard clinical testing. It can also develop into one of the most aggressive cancers.
Wait and see.
That's one of the options given to Davies, a Town N' Country resident, by her doctors.
It wasn't what she wanted to hear, and it wasn't what she did.
"I just lost my daughter 41/2 ago when she was killed in a car crash on her 18th birthday," said Davies. "I thought, what would I tell my husband, my friends, if I had cancer after going through that?"
Instead, she decided to take an aggressive course of action against an aggressive disease. She had a bilateral prophylactic mastectomy.
That means she had both breasts removed, then reconstructed. Waiting and wondering if the next checkup would reveal cancer wasn't an option in her mind. Chemotherapy wasn't either, if the fibroids developed into cancer.
"I'll do anything rather than have chemo," Davies said. "LCIS is not taken seriously by so many patients and doctors because it isn't classified as cancer. Just a warning. That was enough warning for me."
She did take it seriously, and so did her physician, Tampa doctor Sylvia Campbell.
"This cancer is like a time bomb," Davies said, "When they were removing my breasts, they saw that the fibroids had turned into cancer and it was spreading. They told me I was just weeks away from needing chemotherapy."
Davies found out she had LCIS as many other women do: by chance.
Now 42, she didn't have her first mammogram until she was 41. It was then that the doctors found something odd. From the day she was diagnosed with LCIS, it took 10 months to have the double mastectomy, have breast implants put in and have nipples tattooed on to complete the reconstruction.
"My advice to women who take this route is don't rush this part or you will go through a lot of pain," she said. "I was lucky to have Dr. Lewis Berger for my plastic surgeon. Not all (plastic surgeons) are that good."
Davies hopes to show women that taking an aggressive stance when it comes to the threat of cancer can have a great outcome. She wants to dispel some of the notions women have that mastectomy will leave you disfigured and not a whole woman.
"I've had cancer survivors tell me they would rather go through chemo than lose their breasts," she said. "That is just insane. Why would anyone want to put their body through that kind of torture? They're just scared to have a part of their body removed. And they're afraid they'll get an incompetent plastic surgeon. That is why plastic surgeons need to be held to a higher level of accountability for their work."
To inform women that they can go through the ordeal of reconstruction and come out looking and feeling like themselves, if not better, Davies has embarked on a whirlwind of television appearances, book signings and underwear ads.
She was on the last Leeza show, where she showed the all-female audience her breasts. She has a book signing this weekend, and she has just been to Hilton Head to meet with Saks 5th Avenue representatives about a possible underwear ad campaign to show people how she looks post-surgeries.
Her new book outlines the turmoil she went through and what got her through.
"It's a positive attitude. You have to be positive. I figured, if I can deal with my daughter's death, I can surely deal with cancer."
BOOK SIGNING
Where: Barnes & Noble, 122 Brandon Town Center Drive
When: 3 to 7 p.m. Saturday
Call: (813) 685-5503
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