1. My Life Without Me: This is a story about a young working mother named Ann with two daughters and a husband. She lives with her family in a tiny trailer in her mother's backyard. After she collapses one day she goes to the doctor who gives her grave news. She tells no one. Ann's emotional journey leads her to unexpected places and gives her life new meaning: the tender moments, the volatile emotions she must keep inside, the recognition that she has the power to understand, examine and fully live her own life.
2. Sweet November: Each month free-spirited Sara starts a new relationship. her task is to take a month to make one man become a better person, and then she moves on. While November rolls around and Sara targets a busy Tycoon, she does not plan on falling in love. But they do, and as a result, Nelson learns the painful secret behind the brevity of Sara's romances.
3. The Family Stone: A comedy with heart. This story is about an annual holiday gathering of an unconventional New England family. Before the holidays are done, relationships will unravel while new ones are formed, secrets will be revealed and the Stone family will come together though its extraordinary capacity for love.
4. The Doctor: Jack is a doctor with it all. He is then diagnosed with throat cancer. Now that he has seen medicine, hospitals, and doctors from the patient's perspective, he realizes there is more to being a doctor than surgery and prescriptions.
5. Fine Things: Bernie Fine, a is a home loving New Yorker. One day, while walking the floors he meets Jane, a little girl who has lost her mother. When they find her mother, Liz, Bernie is enchanted with her and they become involved and eventually marry. Liz becomes pregnant, but their joy is short lived as after their son, Alexander, is born Liz is diagnosed with Leukemia.
6. Wit: This is a story about a women receiving treatment for ovarian cancer. She is in the hospital bed showing what life is like for a cancer patient, most likely going to die from her disease, to hold on to her wit.
7. Stepmom: Jackie and Isabel have nothing in common--one is the ideal mother, the other is struggling to be any kind of mother--until circumstances force them to share a family and put aside their mutual hostility for the sake of the children. They discover how precious life, love and the ties that bind them really are in this tale about the intricate circumstances surrounding what happens when a man's new wife learns from his former wife that she is terminally ill with cancer.
   

Call Me Larry, that is his name. This remarkable young racehorse came in first in the sixth race at Aqueduct Raceway. His owner Suzie O'Cain, will donate ten percent of his earnings to The Breast Cancer Research Foundation.

The horse is named after Dr. Larry Norton, Breast Cancer Research Foundation Scientific Director and Chairman of the Medical Advisory board, in a cute story. Suzie felt obligated not to use Dr. Norton's first name when addressing him. However, he kept urging her to 'Call me Larry'!

So the horse was named Call Me Larry in honor of Dr. Norton and to raise funds for The Breast Cancer Research Foundation.

What some special young women have learned throughout their breast cancer journey.

What cancer has taught me:

• To see beauty in what before I would have thought to be ugly.
• That there are total strangers that can lift your spirits.
• Who my true friends are.
• To forgive.
• To bring a sweater everywhere I go.
• Not to feel guilty about day-time naps.
• How to swallow five pills at a time.
• To ask every nurse, clerical person, lab tech, scan tech I encounter what their name is.
• To give more hugs and always tell the ones I love ..that I do love them..every time we speak.
• How to poop and throw up at the same time.
• To look at my kids more (when they are not looking).
• To realize that you can live with cancer.
• Meds are my friends.
• Hair grows really slowly.
• Some drugs make you fat.
• Life is really not fair, and bad things happen to really good people.
• To be more comfortable challenging authority, asking more questions and speaking my mind.
• That my husband absolutely adores me.
• To be more selfish and take time out for me.
• To go out and do the things that make me happy.
• Not to take life or people for granted.
• To see the little things in life that I never saw before.
• To love even more than before.
• Time is very valuable.
• Where to find a good wig in New York.
• That I'm not that afraid of needles.
• That I really am a 'glass half full' person.
• That I'm stronger than I ever expected.
• How nice it is to sit on the porch on a warm day.
• That being bald ain't so bad.
• That I can cope with more than I ever thought possible.
• That it is okay to need other people, okay to be vulnerable and okay to ask for help.

Every time I hear about someone who has died from cancer, it knocks me down a notch. It makes me sad for the person, for the family, for the friends, for me -- because I know I am not guaranteed survival from cancer and while I mostly live each day as if I am immune to this tragic outcome, the knowledge that people do really die from this disease that I am trying to beat is overwhelmingly sobering. And what shakes me most is the fact that these people who die from cancer must have had the same outlook as me at some point in their journey -- the outlook of promise and hope and continued survival. And then something happens that jolts this hope from their grasp. It could happen to me -- and my family and my friends. And that scares me.

Sometime last year, my husband told me about a woman in one of his graduate classes whose husband was fighting melanoma that had spread to his brain. He was in year number eight of constant treatment -- both traditional and alternative -- and with each day, his hope for survival was fading. His wife and my husband talked at times about his journey -- and they talked about my journey with breast cancer. And after the class ended, both spouses periodically checked on each other. Today, my husband asked this woman in an e-mail about her husband. She replied and shared that he died last October. She wrote that he could not fight any longer -- that the last chemotherapy he tried to endure was too hard on him. He died with dignity. And she is proud of him. And I can't stop crying.

My tears will dry. And sadness will drift from my every thought. And I will return to my usual enthusiastic approach to surviving my own dreaded disease. But in the back of my mind, where I have saved every sad story about cancer and death, my sorrow will linger. And I suppose it should. So I can keep my sights on the possibility that surrounds me -- death -- and so I can continue living with every fiber of my being. Because living is not a guarantee. Ever.

The topic of my hair is often the subject of conversation -- and is a constant reminder that this brown curly hair I have covering my head is nothing like the straight blond hair I was born with, grew up with, was known for. Because my little boys have white blond hair, I am consistently asked by strangers, "Where did your boys get that blond hair?" "From me," is what I want to say because it's the truth -- but that would make no sense to anyone who does not know me, anyone who does not know that my hair -- that once looked much like my boys' hair -- was lost to chemotherapy and returned shockingly different. So sometimes I just chuckle in wonder with these strangers who may not expect an answer anyway. Or I tell them the story -- if they seem to really want in on the details of the mystery. Most people are surprised that my hair grew back like it did. I am not surprised -- I was warned that it might happen -- although it is still a startling discovery each time I look in the mirror, each time I look back at photos, each time I see gray hairs emerging through my dark hair -- gray that only slightly showed up in the midst of my blond locks.

The memory of my blond hair keeps popping up. My husband told me the other day that he had a dream about me -- I was in a restaurant, at a table, by myself. He was walking toward me. And I had blond hair. The rest of the dream is insignificant. The blond hair is significant. And the other day, I pulled my brush out of my purse. It hasn't been used in more than a year -- because I don't brush my curls at all -- and at the base of the brush, wound around the bristles, were long blond strands of hair. My blond hair. My old hair. The same hair I showed my friend who visited from Ohio last week -- the hair that was once on my head, was cut off in preparation of the great fallout, and is now kept in a ziplock bag.

I like my brown hair. I like my curls. But I miss my blond hair. I am sad that I no longer match my children, that I don't look like the bride in my wedding photo, that I will attend my 20-year high school reunion in two years and will wear a photo name tag that looks nothing like me. I like the familiar -- which is why I never wanted to show my bald head, why I covered my head with blond wigs and hats to keep my appearance as close to normal as possible. And then in a strange turn of events, my hair grew back in an unfamiliar fashion -- and somehow the question, "I see where your boys get that blond hair" flip-flopped into "Where did your boys get that blond hair?" It is all still new to me. I know one day it will become familiar and normal and not such a big deal. Some day. I hope.

Someone raced for the cure -- in celebration of me. I am honored and flattered and so thrilled to have received in the mail today a t-shirt and the crumpled piece of pink paper than hung from my aunt's back -- with my name on it -- as she ran this 5K race in Aspen, Colorado on July 15. It was the 16th annual Susan G. Komen Race for the Cure in Aspen, and my aunt has run for me for two years now. I have a t-shirt and pink piece of paper from last year too. Maybe one day I will run it for myself. First, I have to master the whole running thing.

The Susan G. Komen Breast Cancer Foundation Race for the Cure began in 1983 with 800 participants. Today the Komen Race for the Cure is the largest 5K event in the world. And in 2005, more than one million people participated in more than 100 races designed not only to raise funds but to also educate the public about early detection -- about how it is the most effective method of surviving this life-threatening disease. The five-year survival rate is 95 percent when the disease is discovered while still confined to the breast. I'm proud to have found my own lump early, before it had spread outside my breast. And I am proud to have been a part of a race -- even in name only -- that might make this early discovery possible for many more women to come.

Over a month ago we introduced you to Miriam Engelberg, breast cancer survivor and author of Cancer Made Me a Shallower Person: A Memoir in Comics. Years before she was diagnosed with cancer, she had planned on creating comics featuring life as a mother.

Instead, she used cartooning as a way to cope with the shock of diagnosis, surgery, chemotherapy, support groups, and a second cancer diagnosis. Today I discovered her blogging at Live Journal about her current cancer treatments, adventures in the world of being a published author and every day life as Miriam Engelberg.

In addition, at her Miriam Engelberg website, she features a weekly cartoon. Engelberg is simply delightful and deliciously funny. You'll enjoy the blog and the featured weekly cartoon.  

Celebrity Naked Chef Jamie Oliver has started a true food revolution to ban junk food and get fresh, tasty and, above all, nutritious food back on the school lunch menu. As a result of public demands for better food for England's school children -- inspired in part by Oliver's very vocal and public campaign -- government officials have announced new nutritional standards in how often school children can be served certain foods. According to the new guidelines for school lunches, school meals must be free from low quality meat products, fizzy drinks, crisps, and chocolates. Also banned is the sale of junk food at school and in vending machines. School lunch programs are required to provide at least two portions of fruits and vegetables, and to offer high quality meat, chicken or oily fish on a regular basis.

"This is a really ambitious program," Schools Minister Jim Knight told BBC radio. "It will take a long time to transform a whole culture around food and transform the health content of school meals, undoing decades of neglect." Yes, but change has to start somewhere -- and this seems a good start. Everyone talks about the problems of obesity in children and the long-term health consequences such as an increased risk for cancers later in life, but here is someone who took it on to inspire a nation to make a difference -- and appears to be succeeding. Hats off to Oliver!