In Sandra's Shoes

During a holiday party, I had a chance to talk with a friend who successfully battled cancer found in her nasal passage in 2007. While she quickly pointed out that she was blessed and things could have been much worse, she wanted to know when her skin would return to its normal coloring.
It had been a month since her radiation treatment ended and her nose was darker than the rest of her beautiful brown face. I didn't really notice any difference until she pointed it out to me. Her white doctor had told her it would take about three months to return to normal skin tone.
My radiation treatment ended in March and my breast is still slightly darker than the other breast. But my expectation had been that it would take eight months or longer for the color to return. My doctor, who is of Indian descent, told me people of color are affected differently than whites.
While radiation may look like a very bad sunburn on anyone receiving treatment, darker skin takes longer to return to normal.
It's a question the medical world is catching up to now. Are African Americans or others affected differently by cancer diagnosis or treatments? Sometimes the answer is that no one knows because there haven't been enough studies in any one area. Or they weren't enough African Americans or people of color in the study to note any differences.
Headlines late last year pointed out the forumula doctors use to calculate a woman's risk of breast cancer underestimates the danger for African-American women most of the time and especially for those age 50 and older.
Assumptions have been made that the results are the same for African American women as they are for all women. We're finding out that it's not always true. And now we need to know what those differences are.