Julia Louis-Dreyfus Has Breast Cancer..

[DFW]

10. We've been there. It wasn't fun.

As a second class patient under the German system, my wife got her diagnosis in January of 2001, and they said they'd let her know when they could treat her. She finally had the operation in May, and by then it had spread to the lymph nodes on her left side, all of which had to be removed. A brutal round of chemo spread over a couple of months, then six weeks of radiation.

The good part is that she was kept in the hospital for weeks of observation after the operation, and after the radiation was done, she got an insurance-paid month at a cancer rehab spa in the Black Forest. Yin and yang.

I hope Julia Dreyfus gets fabulous care, and goes on to call attention to how necessary it is that ALL women get examined often, and treated early if diagnosed. When cancer came back to haunt my wife again last year, it was somewhere else, and in a mostly incurable form called "the murderer." If not diagnosed in time, she would have been long dead by now.