Dr. Susan Love (’98) has been battling cancer for most of her life.
She’s battled it as a surgeon, as the founder of both the Faulkner Breast Center in Boston and the Revlon UCLA Breast Center here in Westwood. As the author of the definitive book on the subject, Dr. Susan Love’s Breast Book, she’s helped millions of readers to battle it themselves. Today, she continues to take the fight to the disease as chief visionary officer of the Dr. Susan Love Research Foundation.
Love has also battled the disease in her personal life. Now cancer free, she is a survivor of leukemia. As she prepared her keynote remarks for UCLA Anderson’s 6th annual Velocity Women’s Leadership Summit, she took time out to speak with the UCLA Anderson Blog.
Q: What did your own experience with cancer teach you about fighting the disease?
It taught me (about) the collateral damage, the long-term consequences of treatments — what we euphemistically in the medical profession call “side effects.” But really, they’re not side effects, they last forever. They’re more like having your car in a crash. You can get it fixed, but the passenger door never quite opens the same way again.
After cancer, there are certain things that just don’t get better. We’ve made a lot of progress in treating metastatic breast cancer. We still can’t cure it, but we can certainly keep people alive a lot longer than we could in the past. The problem is that it’s not without a cost of collateral damage. And if you only have a limited amount of time, we certainly would like your quality of life to be as good as possible.
Q: When we spoke in 2010, you talked about “preventing breast cancer” as opposed to “curing breast cancer.” Is that still the goal? What are some of the studies your team is working on eight years later?
We haven’t given up on prevention. I’ve been trying to map the breast ducts and figure out where breast cancer starts for a long time. We’ve started a new way of doing that, where we actually took women who were lactating and did whole breast 3-D ultrasounds. I figured they would have milk in their ducts, so I could see them on the ultrasounds and we would be able to come up with a map.
We worked on this project with the Jet Propulsion Lab in Pasadena, actually, because they are really good at fuzzy imaging. What we found in our initial work, was surprising: not all the ducts are making milk. You start out with the lower outer duct, and as you breastfeed longer you start recruiting other ducts. The last duct that you recruit into operation is the upper outer duct. The reason that’s interesting is that the upper outer duct is the one that gets the most cancers. So, maybe people who don’t breastfeed long enough don’t use that duct, and therefore it’s more at risk. We’re now going to move to Phase Two, which will (involve) women who are long-term breastfeeders — who are breastfeeding at least nine months — and do the whole breast ultrasound on them and see if we can get a better map out of that.
Q: The treatment, or mistreatment, of women — in entertainment, in tech, in a variety of fields — has dominated the news lately. You’re a surgeon, a typically male-dominated specialty. What is your message to the women attending the Velocity conference?
People often ask me how I became a breast surgeon. And they want me to say I was at my mother’s death bed or something like that. But actually, it was pure sexism. I was a chief resident in surgery at Harvard, and when I finished, nobody offered me a job. And so I hung up a shingle, and the people that were referred to me were all women with breast problems. And I found that I could make a much bigger difference in that arena than I could fixing hernias and doing general surgery. There’s always something unique that, as a woman, you can bring to the table that actually makes it better. And the trick, I think, is not to just give in and put up with the shit, but to make your own path. I think that living your life out loud is the best way.
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