Global Courant
Almost 300,000 women in the US will be diagnosed with invasive breast cancer this year. For many, their first instinct upon hearing the news will be to arm themselves with information, Google, read, and question their doctors in an effort to understand their illness and the best route to recovery.
The fact that there are both a range of treatment options and a wealth of information available to patients with breast cancer is due in part to Dr. Susan Love, the surgeon, researcher, author and activist who died Sunday at home in Los Angeles at the age of 75 years.
The cause was a recurrence of leukemia, which she was first diagnosed with in 2012.
“Having cancer myself has at least given me a new sense of urgency,” Love told the Times after her first round with the disease.
“It is a reminder that we have a finite time frame. Raised as a good Catholic girl, now an Episcopalian, I was raised to make the world a better place. I have to do that.”
As the founder and director of what is now the UCLA/Revlon Breast Clinic, and later a best-selling author and frequent advocate, Love lobbied for increased federal funding for women’s health research and a clinical approach that gave patients a voice in their own treatment.
She encouraged patients to take an active role in their care and created a comprehensive breast cancer guide long before the internet made such information easily accessible.
“She should be seen as a trailblazer, a trailblazer who has moved the field forward in several important ways: breast cancer treatment, bringing women to a level playing field in terms of funding,” said Dr. Catherine Carpenter, a UCLA cancer epidemiologist. “I don’t know where we would be without her.”
Love was born in Long Branch, NJ in 1948. She chose medicine as her calling as a high school student in Mexico City, where her family had moved for her father’s work.
“I had this wonderful nun as a biology teacher,” Love told The Times in 1992. “She got me interested in science.”
She was also drawn to the church and initially planned to practice as both a doctor and a nun. She entered a convent as a student at Maryland University’s Notre Dame, but eventually left both institutions and completed her undergraduate degree at Fordham University.
She received her medical degree from the State University of New York Downstate’s College of Medicine and residency at Beth Israel Hospital in Boston, where she would become the first female general surgeon in 1980.
In the early days of Love’s practice in the male-dominated field of surgery, breast surgery was seen by many status-conscious practitioners as less challenging and less prestigious work.
“I once had a chief of surgery say to me, ‘The problem with breast surgery is that the talk-to-cut ratio is all wrong,'” she told The Times. “‘You have to talk to the patient too much for the amount of cutting you have to do.'”
Wary of being sidelined, Love initially resisted being pigeonholed as a breast specialist. But the more patients she saw, the more dissatisfied she became with the disinterested approach to surgery for a common and often fatal cancer.
The prevailing treatment for breast cancer at the time was mastectomy, radiation and chemotherapy, a grueling, one-size-fits-all approach that Love often derided as “slash, burn and poison.”
Although life-saving necessity in some cases, mastectomies were not right for every patient. They also tended to prioritize the surgeon’s schedule over the patient’s needs — completely removing a breast took less time and required less technical skill than the lumpectomy procedures that emerged in the 1980s.
Love, who joined the Harvard Medical School faculty in 1987, believed that patients could and should push their doctors for the ideal course of treatment.
“That was pretty revolutionary at the time,” says Dr. Patricia Ganz, a UCLA breast cancer oncologist and director of the Center for Cancer Prevention and Control Research at the Jonsson Comprehensive Cancer Center. “Women started to realize that they didn’t have to do exactly what the first doctor told them.”
Love often wore a badge on the lapel of her lab coat that read, “Stay tuned.” Get a second opinion.” In 1990 she published ‘Dr. Susan Love’s Breast Book,” a comprehensive guide to the biology and treatment of breast cancer.
The book, co-written with Karen Lindsey, has been hailed as a bible for the newly diagnosed patients and has sold some 500,000 copies in seven editions.
“Her book was essential before we had the internet and other organizations on the internet that can provide accurate information,” said Ganz.
In 1991, Love co-founded the National Breast Cancer Coalition, an advocacy group that lobbies for breast cancer funding and access to care. The following year, she and her family moved to Los Angeles, where she joined the faculty at UCLA and became the founder of the breast clinic. Four years later, she left patient care and resigned from the center to pursue an MBA and establish a broader platform for her advocacy. She became the medical director of the Santa Barbara Breast Cancer Institute and expanded it into a nationwide foundation to increase breast cancer research. In 2000, the organization was renamed the Susan Love MD Breast Cancer Research Foundation.
Love beaten paths in her personal life too. After giving birth in 1988, Love successfully sued the state of Massachusetts with her partner, Helen Cooksey, for the right to jointly adopt their daughter, paving the way for other gay parents to secure their rights in a state that did not yet have them. recognized. sex marriage.
Love and Cooksey, also a surgeon, got married in California as soon as same-sex marriage became legal — first in San Francisco in 2004 and a second time when licenses were issued statewide in 2008.
“She wasn’t afraid to be the first, not afraid to say, I demand to be respected, I expect to be respected,” said Dr. Laura Esserman, a breast cancer oncologist at UC San Francisco. “And she did the same for women whose complaints had been ignored.”
In addition to her wife, Love is survived by their daughter, Katie Patton-LoveCooksey, and daughter-in-law, Diana Patton-LoveCooksey.
Friends and colleagues reached Wednesday remembered Love as an iconoclast with a seemingly endless reserve of energy — an “unaudacious, out-of-the-box thinker,” Esserman said, who wasn’t afraid to challenge what she believed to be no longer served the patients she so intensely cared for.
“This is the kind of legacy she leaves behind,” Esserman said. “Doubt the status quo. Look closely at the evidence – is it correct? Is it good enough? And if not, work hard to change it.
