I saw this on msn and i thought it was amazing!! What a way to make your relationship stronger!


Through 41 years of marriage, Michael and Barbara Welsh expected to share just about everything, for better or worse. But they never thought one of those things would be breast cancer.

The Ohio couple are a medical curiosity: a husband and wife both diagnosed with a disease far more common in women, but not unknown in men. They are using the publicity generated by their story to spread the word that breast cancer isn’t just a women’s disease.

“I didn’t know that men could get breast cancer,” Michael Welsh told TODAY’s Natalie Morales Friday in New York. “You see all the ads on TV, the women doing the monthly exams. You never see a man doing that. So how are we supposed to know?”
Michael was joined by his wife, a petite woman whose salt-and-pepper hair is starting to grow back now that she has completed her chemo and radiation treatments.

“If nothing else, we’ve got one another,” she said of their shared battle. “I’m in it for him, and he’s in it for me.”

Not a pulled muscle
The Welshes’ story began in December 2008, when Barbara discovered a lump in her right breast. After a lumpectomy, she underwent chemo and radiation treatments that ended Thursday.

While Barbara, 63, was undergoing her treatment, Mike, 62, discovered that he, too, had breast cancer. “I happened to get in the car, put my seat belt on,” he told Morales. “It was uncomfortable. I moved around a little bit, and it didn’t get much better, so I eventually went to my family doctor, and mentioned, ‘Hey, I got a problem.’ He said, ‘Where?’ ”

Mike said he thought he might have pulled a muscle doing yard work, but it turned out to be much more serious. His doctor sent him to get a mammogram, which Mike described as a test not designed for male breasts and sheer torture.

When he got the diagnosis, he couldn’t believe it. “It was devastating,” he said. “It was, for lack of a better word, surreal, because men, they don’t get breast cancer.”

After undergoing a mastectomy for his stage 4 cancer, Mike is looking at a regimen of oral chemo treatment and possibly radiation. “My prognosis is good,” the bearded father of one and grandfather of five said.

Rare in men
Just 1 percent of all breast cancers occur in men, but that still amounts to nearly 2,000 cases in the United States each year. An estimated 40,000 women and 440 men die each year from the disease, according to the National Cancer Institute.

“Male breast cancer is rare, and because it is rare, it’s hard to define what the risk factors are,” oncologist Kathie-Ann Joseph of New York-Presbyterian Hospital told Morales. “Mike is a classic example. It affects older men, men in their 60s and 70s. There are hereditary risk factors that are associated with it. Twenty percent of all men who get breast cancer have the genetic predisposition for it.”
Laughter, the best medicine
Fortunately, the couple are able to laugh about the unanticipated bond they share. Barbara coped with her hair loss by wearing rainbow-colored wigs around town. She didn’t wear one to the TODAY show Friday, but she did sport a pink sweatshirt with the legend “I’m a breast cancer survivor.” Michael wore a pink breast cancer wristband.
TODAY
Battling breast cancer with humor, Barbara Welsh wore a rainbow-colored wig to conceal her hair loss due to chemo.
Now that she has completed her treatment, Barbara told Morales, “I’m doing wonderful. I will be glad when I get hair.”
She added that to show solidarity, “My son even shaved his head for me.”
With Mike yet to undergo treatment, the couple still have a fight ahead of them. But they’re grateful for how their unusual fate has brought them even closer together. They also share a certainty about where they’ll be a year from now.
Said Barbara: “We will be together — doing whatever.”

Jamie Crowther

Assignment # 5

write you definition of honesty and Dishonesty. Count how many times you were dishonest this week. Read ch 10.

New York Times Article

There was an interesting article in the New York Times last week (10/15/2009)regarding changes in the 'dating scene'. The title Rethinking the Older Woman-Younger Man Relationship talked of the 'loosening of relationship conventions' within the female baby boomers. Sociologists have stated that we are currently faced with the 'tightest marriage squeeze - the smallest pool of compatible men as conventionally defined - two to three years older, of similar background and higher levels of education and income.' Over the last few decades woman have delayed marriage to pursue careers but the men have still dated and married younger women.

The article goes on to qoute Sandra L. Caron, a professor of family relations and human sexuality at the University of Maine who states that woman are no longer looking for a man to take care of them, "That might be fine and dandy if you're in high school and have this fairy tale Prince Charming. But when you look at adult women, most are self-sufficient and they don't have to look for that." Her study published in the Journal of Couple and Relationship Therapy reports that couples believe their age difference matters more to the outside wold than to themselves. Nichole R. Proulx was the lead author of the study and said that she intially thought she would find more issues than she did but these May-December relationships are just like any others.

Researches at the University of Chicago and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology say that men 'consistently dislike older women' - but this study has yet to be published.

A number of sociologists are saying that this is a real demographical shift, 'driven by new choices that woman over 40 are making as they redefine the concept of a suitable mate.' Although the percentage of marriages of women who are 5 to 10 years older than their spouses is still small (5.4% and 1.3% respectively)these rates doubled between 1960 and 2007. Marriages between older men and younger women decreased steadily through 1980 but has remained stable since.

E. Linda Moore

80's dating video

Here is a video that i thought was interesting, it shows a lot of the changes that there have been when it comes to dating. and interestingly enough, it shows that some things just don't change....



Scott Johansen