So God Made a Mother is Here! 🎉

**Editor’s note. Welcome to Dr. Susan Greenwald, MD. If you have questions for a pediatrician, please post. We will forward them and have them answered on Wednesdays “Her Self” days at HVFH.

 

Written by Dr. Susan L. Greenwald, MD from The Kearney Clinic

From my earliest memory, Miss America and all of the other important people in the world talked about how great it would be to cure cancer. Just saying the “C” word is enough to give most people hives.

The biggest news in the past 2 decades isn’t a cure for cancer, but the discovery that many cancers start with a virus that can actually be PREVENTED.
All these years, when you had your yearly PAP smear, the lab technicians reading them were actually looking for changes in the cells that indicate cancer. It wasn’t until recently that anyone knew that those changes were caused by a virus. This was a breakthrough every bit as huge as when it was discovered that AIDS was caused by the HIV virus. (In fact, an immunization for HIV is in the early stages of development.)
Since Jonas Salk invented the first polio vaccine in the 1950’s, vaccine technology and manufacture has become rather mundane. Give medical science any virus, and they will figure out a way to make a vaccine against it. The vaccines against bacteria are trickier but just as successful. Maybe modern parents have become complacent because this generation has not seen the devastation wrought by Hemophilus Influenzae meningitis and Meningococcemia that killed a steady number of babies and toddlers, and neurologically devastated many more until the vaccines became available in the 80’s and 90’s. I don’t want to date myself but I witnessed that misery in my early career.
My parents witnessed the Polio and Pertussis deaths of a generation before. Measles caused sterility and Tetanus was a death sentence.
Think what a miracle it would seem to those previous generations to think that we can now prevent CANCER with a SHOT!
In fact, it is not a new concept. The reason your babies received Hepatitis A and B vaccines is not because it is cost effective to prevent hepatitis infections in everyone. Those are miserable infections but people generally recover. The reason your insurance company pays for those vaccines is because a certain number of those viral infections will smolder in the liver, causing liver cancer decades later.

Cancer is expensive.

 

With this history in mind, here are the facts:
1. Several strains of HPV cause the majority of cervical cancer. The virus also causes penile cancer, oral cancer and venereal warts.
2. Using vaccines to prevent a virus is an old, tested and proven technology. There is nothing new here. Side effects are similar to any other vaccine.
3. Vaccine prevention still works if you do it many years too early, it doesn’t work if you do it a day too late.
4. Surveys have shown that around 25% of 15 year old teens are sexually active. (Of course that would be none of our sweet babies!)
5. The vaccine is expensive, around $200 per shot or $600 for the series. Cancer is more expensive. That is why all insurance companies and the state are covering the cost.

 

Here’s my recommendation: Run, don’t walk, to the nearest clinic to start the series if you have a teen over 12.

The series can be started as young as 9 years old. If your teen is 15 or older you have absolutely no time to waste. Insurance generally covers up to age 24.
**Yes, it is important for boys to get the vaccine. Most experts believe it was a mistake to offer it only to girls initially. That was a supply issue that no longer exists. By getting your son vaccinated, you will definitely decrease the risk that your future grandchildren may lose their mother or father to cancer.

(Feature Picture Source: CBS News)

So God Made a Mother book by Leslie Means

If you liked this, you'll love our new book, SO GOD MADE A MOTHER available now!

Order Now

This Is How to Show Up for a Friend Who Has Cancer

In: Cancer, Friendship, Living
Bald woman during cancer treatments and same woman in remission, color photo

One moment I was wrestling with my toddler and rocking my 3-month-old to sleep, and the next I was staring blankly at the doctor who just told me I had stage four cancer that had metastasized from my uterus to my left lung and spleen. “Well, I didn’t see that coming,” I smiled at the young doctor who had clearly never given this kind of news to anyone before. I looked over at my husband’s shell-shocked face as he rocked our baby back and forth in the baby carrier because I was still nursing, and we knew we’d be at...

Keep Reading

I Never Wanted to Be a Hospital Mom

In: Cancer, Motherhood
Toddler standing with IV pole, black-and-white photo

Life as a hospital mom is not a life for just anyone. You have no other choice, there is no get-out-free card you can just put down and say, “Nope, Lord, I do not want this, take it back.” My heart hurts 99 percent of the time. My heart hurts for my child and the pain he is suffering. A necessary evil to keep him on the side of Heaven’s gates.  My heart hurts from the unknown of each day. Will he eat? Will he thrive today? What utter chaos will be thrown our way today? Will there be vomit...

Keep Reading

Cancer Is Weird

In: Cancer, Living
Woman smiling, color photo

Cancer is weird. For 3.5 years I looked into the mirror and didn’t recognize the person looking at me.  First, it was scared eyes. My eyes had lost the look in them that made me feel invincible. I had learned I wasn’t.  A week or so later, I saw the cut on my chest for my port. Then it was a bald head. Then a bald, steroid filled, and puffed up faced person looking at me. RELATED: This is What Cancer Looks Like Sometimes it was a teary-eyed, defeated person. Someone who had been up all night in pain.  I...

Keep Reading

Please Don’t Let My Baby Die

In: Cancer, Motherhood
Toddler boy lying in hospital bed, color photo

I wasn’t made for this.  I am not strong enough. Lord, where are you taking me? Why does this joyful time, filled with our last baby’s firsts, have to be this way? Why did the doctors look at me that way? They know what’s coming, and deep down inside, so do I. The inevitable word that is about to come out of their mouths.  The C-word.  Cancer. It’s life-changing.  Almost as if it were a car accident. Believe me, I know about that. To be the reason behind a grown man hanging onto a thread. Completely unintentional. I just needed...

Keep Reading

The Art of Showing Up

In: Cancer, Kids
Dad hugging young son

As a father of four boys, you may imagine that life is hectic from time to time for me.  While it truly is, in fact, quite crazy sometimes, it isn’t always because of the reasons you might think.  I have four boys, ages 11, 4, 3, and almost 2, and that certainly makes for an interesting daily living experience for my wife and me.  We do our best to remain patient and lean on God’s strength and peace to fill us on the days that seem overly daunting and occasionally even downright impossible, but we are human.  Therefore, we fail...

Keep Reading

No One Prepares You for When Your Husband Has Cancer

In: Baby, Cancer, Marriage
Family sitting by window

No one ever prepares you for the moment you hear your spouse has cancer.   More so, no one prepares for you to hear this when you have a 5-month-old at home. “Mom, they said the tumor is cancerous, and they need to enucleate his eye on Thursday,” I say quietly into the phone as I pump in a dirty bathroom stall at the eye hospital.   Whir. Whir. Whir. Whir. Gosh, I hate pumping.  Today is my first day being away from my daughter. My mom is watching her while I made the trip to the eye hospital with...

Keep Reading

l Will Never Stop Missing My Sister

In: Cancer, Grief, Loss
Woman in red shirt

It might be 16 years too late to properly depict the depressive senses that engulfed my whole being when I lost my only sister Aurora to colon cancer in 2006. Painful flashbacks continue to fill my everyday life at the most inopportune moments that  writing about it might somehow alleviate my grief. I remember getting that random phone call from her one sunny day in September 2006 and how guilt automatically hit me. It had been a while since I last saw her. “It’s positive,” she said. Backed with years of joking around and playing tricks on her since childhood,...

Keep Reading

Having Cancer at 34 Taught Me How to Live

In: Cancer
Husband and wife on boat, color photo

This picture came up in my Facebook memories today. It took my breath away for a moment, just like it has for nine years now. It was the last picture taken of me before my midwife found the lump and my life changed forever.  The first time I saw that photo, I realized I didn’t know that woman anymore. She was naive. Laying there in the sun without any inkling that a cancer was growing inside her. Look at her—unafraid and without anxiety. Less than 48 hours later, she would be gone, replaced by someone who was afraid of each...

Keep Reading

How Grateful I Am for a Mother Who Believed in Me

In: Cancer, Grief
Mother and grown daughter, color photo

It was a hot summer day sometime in the middle of high school. I was young and naive, but the ugly six-letter word was looming over our family: cancer. Although I didn’t know it then, this would be our last normal summer before my mother’s health would worsen. Cancer would give way to terminal cancer. It’s funny how something so big can seem so small in those moments. My mom and I were sitting on our back porch, encased in a narrow hedge of yew bushes. It was a yellow, lazy Saturday, and my brothers and father were at Cub...

Keep Reading

A Medical Diagnosis Challenges a Marriage

In: Cancer, Living, Marriage
Bald woman holding clippers over husband's head, color photo

It is no secret now that Albert Pujols and his wife have announced their divorce shortly after she had surgery to remove a brain tumor. As a breast cancer survivor, this news hit me in a special way. As I was reading through an article from Today, there was a quote that hit me hard, “But a marriage falling apart is far more common when the wife is the patient, researchers have found. A woman is six times more likely to be separated or divorced soon after a diagnosis of cancer or multiple sclerosis than if a man in the relationship is...

Keep Reading