Bunchland

And why you need a whole box of kleenex

We run the 5ks and we buy the pink m&m’s, but do we young women give enough thought to breast cancer? Maybe if our mothers or grandmothers or aunts had it, but really, isn’t it something you mostly worry about after or around menopause?

Thing is, breast cancer does affect women in their 20s, 30s and 40s. And the sort of breast cancer that gets you when you’re young is particularly nasty and aggressive. It’s called HER2+ and it means tougher treatments and lower survival rates.

You might have read about HER2+ when a young Toronto mom, Jill Anzarut, was diagnosed with it, but her tumor was too small to quality for the Herception treatment. (And then the media and the people got involved.)  Read more...

After the interview with videogame critic Josh Ostroff, I still wasn’t certain whether I should buy my 4-year-old son a Nintendo Wii. So I called up Robin Benger, an old friend of mine. Robin is a Toronto documentary filmmaker and father to three children, including his oldest, 25-year-old Griffin Benger, who first started playing videogames as an 11-year-old boy and quickly found his way to the military-based first-person shooter, Counter-Strike.

Dad Robin tried to limit the gameplay to an hour per day, once Griffin was done his homework. But as the years passed, the game started coming between parent and child. Griffin played the game for hours at a time, then, seemingly, days at a time. If he was banned from the computer, he waited until his parents were asleep, then crept downstairs to play all night. When Robin disconnected and hid the computer, Griffin would sneak out in the middle of the night and go to web cafes to play. Sometimes he’d be out for days at a time.