A doctor tells a woman, “Your test came back positive; you’ve got breast cancer.” It’s a scary moment. What’s her first thought? What will she do? What would you do?
It’s a question I had asked myself many times since first being traumatized by the site of my mother’s radical mastectomy when I was still a teenager.
Now, there’s a much less morbid treatment option than surgery. A woman doesn’t necessarily have to lose her breast or a part of her breast if she doesn’t want to. I know because I helped make that option available. It’s called Cryoablation. I helped by volunteering to be a patient pioneer 21 years ago, in 2003, thus becoming the first woman in America to treat my cancer with cryoablation and save my breast.
I’m now 74 and remain cancer-free. I’ve spent much of my life since that time helping other women learn about Cryoablation through such activities as co-writing a book with my husband and my doctor, They’re Mine and I’m Keeping Them.
While still painfully slow to become universally adopted, this alternative breast cancer treatment is beginning to change women’s healthcare by offering an option many are eagerly embracing. Women from many parts of the world have successfully used it. By the dozens, by the hundreds, and, in southern Asia, by the tens of thousands.
But in 2003, that was not the case. Let me tell you my story.
The only option given to me in 2003 was a mastectomy. As a figurative artist and an Associate Professor of Art, specializing in the Figure, I wasn’t keen on having my body disfigured. Losing a body part was akin to scratching over the “Mona Lisa” in that I saw the female figure, all female figures, as a creation by life’s most talented Creator of form. Our Divine Creator.
Providence, luck, good timing, and my husband’s determined silver-tongued phone skills all came together to find us Dr. Peter Littrup at the Karmanos Cancer Center in Detroit. Dr. Littrup had been heard giving a speech about the application of his freeze ball technique being used to treat prostate cancer in men. In the speech, he mentioned that the technique would be an even easier application for treating tumors in women’s breasts. He speculated someday it would prove to be an effective breast cancer treatment.
Did he mean it? I was willing to volunteer to try it out.
Well, he did mean it. And it was, and is, fabulously successful. Even on my three tumor cases, which wasn’t an easy “first try.” Getting to try it meant several trips to Detroit from my home in Portland, Oregon.
First, for doctors to test my sanity and courage as well as to look at my breast. Then, for treatment, done under full anesthesia in an operating room with GPVS doctors witnessing the historical event, and finally to have my whole body tested by a special machine capable of finding any tiny tumor. The last was a necessary confirmation of cryoablation’s success to conclude Dr. Littrup’s paper and to quell my home system’s radiologist, who hadn’t yet been trained on how to read an MRI showing new breast growth at the edge of the freeze zone. (They had mistaken it for tumor growth).
Cryoablation was eventually going to make its way into the world. It’s too good of a treatment idea not to. I like to believe my volunteering to try it out when I did might have sped things up a bit, at least enough to have helped give the option to some of the desperate women who contacted me soon after my book came out.
Having recently witnessed a 20-years-later “freeze” application being performed by Dr. Dennis Holmes of Adventist Hospital, out of Glendale in Los Angeles, California, I can say the equipment now being used is much smaller and more appropriate for a woman’s breast than the prostate equipment used on me in my experimental cryoablation operation, 20 + years ago.
The equipment used on me for the first cryoablation tryout operation was designed for use in a man’s prostate. The probe that delivered the gas that did the freezing was large and crude by comparison. (Dr. Littrup and two of his colleagues hadn’t yet developed the standard probe used today, which is much smaller and fit for a woman). By comparison, the probe that administers the constantly contained nitrogen gas that creates the freeze ball is much smaller.
Today’s patient does not have to endure knock-out anesthesia either. Cryoablation is now done in a clinical setting, usually taking less than an hour, with the patient going home or out for a meal afterward. I’m so impressed and amazed.
Many women have allowed me to hear their cryoablation success stories. I’ve celebrated their happiness at being able to look down to see their breasts intact after cancer treatment, just as I had, although mine were so swollen it looked more like a small watermelon. Still, I was so happy seeing it there.
I have also helped carry the burden of many women’s continued challenges as Patient Pioneers push doctors to explore the boundaries of what cryoablation can do.
I’ll finish my tale with an unexpected observation my naive self had from cancer researchers and doctors when I was an invited speaker at an International Cancer Forum at Fuda Hospital in Guangzhou, China.
Doctors from different parts of the world told me that women need to ask their doctors for cryoablation. Otherwise, it most likely won’t be offered. Indeed, this has proven to be true.
The women who have shared their stories with me tell a consistent tale: they refuse standard treatment, going out of their system to get cryoablation. Their home physicians become aware of cryo’s effectiveness through follow-up care after they’ve traveled elsewhere to get it, usually t from Dr. Littrup on the East Coast or Dr. Holmes on the West Coast. Their doctors become impressed with the results.
In several happy cases, this has led to a hospital system acquiring cryoablation equipment, sometimes hiring experienced staff or getting cryo training. Then, Viola! A popular program is born. It doesn’t take a genius to recognize that someday, this activity will hit a “hundredth monkey” mark. Women everywhere will want it
I have been lucky enough myself to experience my stepmom, and now my niece, being able to get the benefits of cryoablation to treat their breast cancer. In my 93-year-old stepmom’s case, she was able to get it through her nursing home’s system by a doctor hired by the very surgeon who had initially offered me a mastectomy. And my niece was treated by Dr. Holmes.
With the efforts of the doctors now treating breast cancer with cryoablation and the brave, patient-pioneering women using it, change is (slowly) happening. Still, today, women are continuing to be over-treated, mutilated, and being offered no significant breast cancer treatment change, just as I wasn’t offered any over 20 years ago.
So, to all the brave, pioneering women and their heroic surgeons who have united in saying- Enough already! I salute you! God Bless. May our daughters and granddaughters never have to experience the fear we faced by hearing, “You have breast cancer.”
Artist, activist, and educator Laura Ross-Paul has received many awards for her work, including the Bonnie Bronson Visual Arts Fellowship, an Oregon Arts Commission Individual Artist Fellowship, and the Susan Cooley Gilliom Artist and Teaching Residency in Roseville, California.
Laura’s art has been singled out for prizes in regional biennials at the Portland Art Museum, Tacoma Art Museums, and Turtle Bay Museum in Redding, California; featured in the cable TV film Spy (1989); and appears on book covers including fiction by Charles Spaeth (2011) and Barbara Wilson (1993) and poetry by Judith Barrington (2015).
Laura holds a BFA from Fort Wright College, Spokane, a BS in Science, and an MFA from Portland State University. As an associate professor of painting and drawing, she has fostered the talents of art students at Lewis and Clark College, Oregon College of Art and Craft, Pacific Northwest College of Art, and Portland State University.
In addition to her contributions as an educator, she is dedicated to community service through her work on numerous boards and committees for arts organizations such as the Regional Arts and Culture Council. She was a co-founder and curator for Portland’s historic non-profit, the Northwest Artists Workshop, and a board member and curator for the also historic Portland Center for the Visual Arts.
As an advocate and activist for women with breast cancer seeking innovative cryoablation treatment, Ross-Paul maintains the Web site keepingthem.com and has spoken at two international cancer cryoablation conferences in Guangzhou, China. She is co-author with Alex Paul and Peter Littrup, M.D., of They’re Mine and I’m Keeping Them, or How Freezing My Breast Saved My Breast (2012), about her experience with breast cancer. A 2016 report on her proposal for what she calls “the early freeze protocol” for breast cancer became the number one most-read article on the popular Web site Breast Cancer News Weekly Digest. Ross-Paul is married to author Alex Paul, and they have three children. The couple live in Portland while spending summers on the Oregon Coast. Ross-Paul maintains an active studio practice in both locations. You can follow her at lauraross-paul.com and on Instagram at LRPPDX.
Learn more about Laura at LauraRoss-Paul.com.
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