• Inviting someone to a movie is definitely safe. One good way to make it a little interesting is to let your date choose the film. You can also suggest alternate movies or foreign/international films. Sometimes film festivals are very interesting and can hold a lot of interest.

• Another interesting way to spend time together on a date is to go out for dinner. This will give you fair amount of time to talk and get to know each other.

• Many people find it easier to go to a club or meet at bars. But this is totally up to individual preference.

 So have fun and enjoy your time together and hope for the best.

The Canadian Press’s story was available on the wire service Feb 7 – 14. The article (full article: yahoo.com) was written by Lorrayne Anthony and I was photographed by CP photographer Aaron Harris. Both were charming, warm, and great to work with.

Versions of the CP story appeared in Macleans, The Chronicle Herald (Halifax), The Ottawa Sun, Medicine Hat News, The Cape Breton Post, The Sarnia Observer, canadaeast.com, The Hamilton Spectator, Kelowna Daily Courier, The Record (Waterloo), The Brandon Sun, The Brooks Bulletin, canada.com, 24 Hours, and The Brockville Recorder. The story also appeared on 21 radio stations across Canada.

Other stories appeared in eye weekly, The National Post, U of T news, The Annex Gleaner, The Villager, and Ryerson’s the eyeopener.

I appeared on CBC Radio One’s Freestyle, Adam Vaughn’s CityTV talkshow, Hour Town, and on CityTV News at 11. iloveyougalleries.com got a mention in Nick Mount’s “Literature For Our Time” course at The University of Toronto, and was The Toronto Public Space Committee’s site of the month for March 05.

Stories and announcements appeared on Torontoist.com, Said Like Reeds Or Things, Blog TO, My Toronto, Le 321 Blogue, and other fine places on the web.

I met all kinds of wonderful people through the show, and there are too many to thank by name here. But thank you.

If you’ve purchased a print, I’ll contact you this week about delivery.

I love you.

I had the opportunity to tell you about two of the grants we recently received in our July e-newsletter. This month, I’m pleased to tell you about a new $850,000 grant we just received from the California Breast Cancer Research Program (CBCRP). (CBCRP, which gives grants solely to researchers in California, is an incredible program. Its grants are funded by California state tobacco taxes. In addition, Californians can donate to the fund by checking off a box on their income tax return.)

As you know, I’m always excited when the Foundation receives a new grant award. But I’m especially excited about this grant because it will allow us to take the next step in studying whether we can treat or prevent breast cancer by putting chemotherapy down the milk ducts.

As many of you know by now, virtually all breast cancer begins in the lining of the milk ducts. Ductal carcinoma in situ (DCIS), which we think of as a precancer, is one of the first steps in this process. When a woman has DCIS, her milk duct is filled with cells that look like cancer cells—but they are contained within this one duct. (As long as the cells are inside this duct, they can’t spread to other parts of the body.) Eventually, 30-40 percent of women with DCIS will go to develop invasive cancer. In these women, the cancer cells are able to gain the strength they need to break out of the duct and invade other areas. In the other 60-70 percent, the cells will never go on to become invasive, and will remain inside the duct.

Unfortunately, we currently have no way to identify which DCIS will progress and which will not. As a result, we treat all cases of DCIS aggressively. Furthermore, we treat it the same way we treat invasive breast cancer—with surgery, radiation, and hormone therapy. And as more and more women have come to be diagnosed with DCIS through mammography screening, concerns about these extreme treatment measures have grown. (Before mammography, we rarely had anything called DCIS, because it doesn’t usually form a lump).

We have lots of data now from studies done on rats and mice that show that putting a low dose of chemotherapy through the nipple into the milk ducts can prevent breast cancer from developing. I like to think of it as acting like Drano, cleaning out the clogged pipes! Our newly funded study will capitalize on the fact that we now can access the ducts in women with a tool—a ductal catheter. This is the same tool that we use to perform ductal lavage, which we use to remove fluid from the duct.

Our hypothesis is that we can treat DCIS by putting the chemotherapy drug pegylated liposomal doxorubicin (PLD), also known as Doxil, directly into the duct that has the DCIS. Studies done in rats have shown that this approach has no side effects. Our study called “Effect of Intraductal Therapy of DCIS with Pegylated Liposomal Doxorubicin (PLD) on Pathology and Biomarkers: A Presurgery Study,” will enroll 30 women who have been diagnosed with DCIS. The study will begin with us identifying which duct contains the DCIS. Second, we will perform an MRI and ductal lavage so that we can document the DCIS. Lastly, we will do one or two intraductal instillations of PLD into the affected duct. Our volunteer will go home, with a surgery date set in four to six weeks. A day or two before the surgery, she will have another MRI , so that we can see what the DCIS now looks like. Then, right before the surgery, we’ll lavage the volunteer’s duct again, so that we can see what the ductal cells look like after having been treated with PLD.

Another exciting aspect of this project is that I’m working both with my close colleague, Ellen Mahoney, MD, and a wonderful advocacy organization in Northern California, the Humboldt County Community Breast Health Project. We are all incredibly enthusiastic about the potential this project has to lead to a new less invasive way to treat DCIS, and we can’t wait to start recruiting women with DCIS from Humboldt County this fall.

I’ve thought about trying to do a research study like this for a long time. To see it actually happening is a sign of how far the intraductal research field has come over the past five years. None of this would have occurred without the generous support we have received from women and men throughout the world who believe in the Foundation and its mission: to eradicate breast cancer within our lifetime. Please join us!

Free EBook, ‘Starting Your Internet Business Right’, by Chris Malta

The second book I selected was The Last Piece of Sky written by Tim Wynne-Jones and illustrated by Marie-Louise Gay (Groundwood). When we opened to the full title page, we discovered the above “I Love You Sky” message. I think I’d like to write a children’s book of the same title!

This reminds me of the first story ever written by Patricia (6 years old at the time), sent by her proud Uncle Gregory Betts.

THESE ARE THE COLOURS OF THE RAINBOW I WROTE
Love grows like flowers and in all different colours because there are
different kinds of love – four loves for happy. Grey and brown loves are
for when you’re angry and the pink is happy and the second pink over the
blue is really super happy and the blue is happy completely. The pink
and the blue are the same thing. The two pinks together are sad. The
yellow tulip is marking the Lord and the pink tulip is marking love. The
grass stands for the beauty. The sun stands for the bright. The sky
stands for the colour blue. The white pronounces wind.

Admit something:

Everyone you see, you say to them, “Love Me”.

Of course you do not say this out loud, otherwise
someone would call the cops.

Still though, think about this, this great pull in us to connect.

Why not become the one who lives with a
full moon in each eye that is
always saying,

with that sweet moon language,
what every other eye in
this world is
dying to
hear?

- Hafiz

Sounds like a perfectly good New Year’s resolution to me.

I’m posting all out of order, but here are The Gala photos. There are the Scream 14 photos.