Fighting for Our Future: How Young Women Find Strength, Hope and Courage While Taking Control of Breast Cancer

Breast cancer. We think of it as a disease for women over 40. We don't associate breast cancer with the young woman just graduating college. The woman starting her first job. The woman about to get married. The woman celebrating her first pregnancy. Yet breast cancer is the leading cause of death in U.S. women between the ages of 25 to 30. Every year, 10,000 U.S. women under 40 are diagnosed with breast cancer - and close to 1,500 of them will eventually die of it. At this very moment, some 250,000 U.S. women under the age of 40 are living with breast cancer. When a young woman is diagnosed with breast cancer, she and her loved ones immediately begin to search for information. This is a particular challenge for women under 40, since virtually all of the available information focuses on older women. On a medical level, young women need to know about issues of fertility and pregnancy; about how treatments and reconstructive surgeries will affect an active lifestyle; and about the possible long-term effects of various treatments. On a personal level, they need help coming to terms with issues of sexuality and dating, coping with the conflicts between a disease and the beginnings of a career, and processing the effects of a life-threatening illness on a new marriage or partnership. Fighting For Our Future is the only comprehensive "survival guide" for young breast cancer patients and their families - the only book that deals with the whole spectrum of issues faced by such women. When young women and their loved ones look for information, this is the only book they can turn to. Meanwhile, the book's engaging narrative style will appeal to an even broader audience that enjoys stories of hope and triumph while learning about larger medical and social issues.

About the Author :
Beth Murphy has been producing, directing and reporting for documentaries and television and radio news for more than 13 years. She is President of Passport Productions, Inc., a company she founded in 1999 to highlight stories of hope and social justice through responsible, thoughtful direct cinema documentaries with a news edge. Murphy has produced nine documentaries for public television. Her programs have also aired on NHK in Japan. Twice she has been nominated for regional Emmys, and she is the recipient of the AP Award for Best Documentary for Keeping the Peace, a program featuring Bosnian peacekeepers. Murphy is an adjunct professor at Suffolk University in Boston and American University Paris, where she teaches courses on media coverage of international crises. Before becoming a documentary filmmaker, Murphy worked as a television news reporter and anchor for News 12 New Jersey and WBOC-CBS in Maryland. In her earliest broadcasting days, she was the News Director and morning-drive anchor for WSUB, an all-news, all-talk station. Murphy has a B.A. in History from the University of Connecticut and an M.A. in International Relations/International Communications from Boston University. She has studied French at the Sorbonne and documentary filmmaking at the George Washington University Center for History in the Media.Her articles have appeared in The Boston Globe, Chicago City Talk and the San Francisco Chronicle. Hometown: Gales Ferry, Connecticut