W
hen Karen Greene, PhD, began noticing occasional drops of blood in the toilet, she didn’t know enough to be worried. Then 52 and past menopause, the psychologist from New York City assumed that it was just a little spotting. When she finally consulted her physician nearly three months later, says Greene, “initially, my doctor assumed the same thing that I did: that the blood was coming from my uterus. After a biopsy showed that I didn’t have cancer of the uterus, she suspected a kidney infection and prescribed antibiotics.” By the time Greene was referred to a urologist several weeks later, her urine had turned bright red. That’s when she received a shocking diagnosis: Greene had bladder cancer. “If I hadn’t been lying flat on my back on the exam table, I would have fainted,” she says. “Of all the diseases I had ever feared, this wasn’t even on the list. I kept thinking, ‘Why me?’ I’d never smoked, ate a healthy diet, and worked out at the gym five times a week. I wasn’t around toxic chemicals and didn’t even dye my hair. I’d always thought this was something an 80-year-old man would get.” Like Greene, many women underestimate their risk for bladder cancer, which strikes about 17,770 American women annually. “Although there’s a perception that bladder cancer is an old man’s disease, after age 50 it affects more women than cervical cancer does,” says Dee E. Fenner, MD, director of gynecology and associate chair for surgical services in the department of gynecology at University of Michigan Health System in Ann Arbor. Although bladder cancer is nearly three times more common in men than women, it’s more often fatal in women, who are up to twice as likely to die within a year of diagnosis than are men.
FALL / WINTER 2011 pause
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