Website takes a utilitarian approach to cancer

Instead of appletinis at a Manhattan bistro, we're having lunch at the (nonetheless girly) Thyme & Dough cafe in Dripping Springs. But blogger Brenda Ray Coffee's approach to breast cancer survivorhood reminds me of a "Sex and the City" episode.

"In many ways, the site is like that," says the Boerne resident, whose "Brenda's Blog" was named "Top Breast Cancer Blog" by Blogs.com. "We talk about hair and nails and diet and men, all those things girlfriends and sisters talk about."

Coffee, a writer and documentarian, launched Breast Cancer Sisterhood (www.breastcancersisterhood.com ) last November as a forum for obscure questions and humorous conundrums (finding realistic nipple substitutes, for instance. Raisins anyone?), as well as potentially life-saving tips, such as don't floss your teeth while on chemotherapy. All the "seemingly small details" she couldn't find when she was diagnosed with estrogen-fueled breast cancer in August 2004. That discovery led to 10 cancer-related surgeries and eight rounds of chemotherapy treatment, but Coffee isn't defeated in the least. She just stopped taking a five-year post-chemo drug and is cancer free. She's striking back at the disease with a vengeance — and a wicked sense of humor.

With the droll wit of an Erma Bombeck and the sometimes steamy approach of a Cosmopolitan advice column, Coffee is filling a much-overlooked niche for women who need resources that are neither medically overwhelming nor focused solely on one person's survival journey. Already her sisterhood has hundreds of families and receives up to 10,000 hits a month.

And later this month, she will self-publish two books on breast cancer survivorship — one, "The Breast Cancer Sisterhood, A Guide to Practical Information and Answers to Your Most Intimate Questions," includes essays by Elizabeth Edwards, estranged wife of Sen. John Edwards, actor Richard Roundtree and high-profile San Antonio anchorwoman and survivor Leslie Mouton. The second book is "Husbands and Heroes: The Breast Cancer Caregivers." For both, Coffee is negotiating with Amazon.com and expects the site to sell them by end of June.

But the Breast Cancer Sisterhood website is at the heart of her mission; Coffee considers it a ministry, even, for cancer survivors and their spouses and children.

Some of the topics, of course, are heart-wrenching; others are downright hilarious, like what led to her raisin-as-nipple breakthrough: A man at her gym dropped a barbell on his foot when he noticed that his work-out neighbor had only one nipple.

"I knew then that I needed to find something!" says the honey-blond woman of indeterminate age, sitting with me amid bougainvillea outside Thyme & Dough. "Listen I've tried everything. Small (round) earrings, or marbles. Marbles were too big and grapes are huge! Then I noticed this dried up box of raisins in my refrigerator, and I thought, hmm "

As Coffee explains, you just tuck one — or two, depending on how many nipples you need — snugly inside your bra cups and voilà! Nipple problem solved.

"You really have to find humor here. You've got enough negative when you're dealing with life and death things. ... Humor's a coping mechanism, it really is."

Of course, it's not all sweetness and light on the sisterhood site, which Coffee began more than two years ago by filming over 100 videos for each member of the breast-cancer "family" (patients, survivors, spouses, children and caregivers). She later launched the site with that content along with reams of links, blogs, comments and portions of the books Coffee's media company is about to publish. So, for all the "how to keep sex alive" or "where are the best wigs" content, there is just as much heady and typically overlooked information — such as blogs for husbands of recently diagnosed women. The theme of that one, Coffee says, takes cues from husband James' motto: '"Hey guys, it's time to cowboy up!"

But the main thing Coffee wants to do is to help sister survivors in distress or provide some levity for those who have come through the worst. Coffee knows of which she speaks, having lost her father to an unidentified cancer when she was 12 and her first husband to lung cancer when she was 37. So when breast cancer struck her — she has no history of it in her family — she was already a storehouse of knowledge and survivors' strength, and she determined to create the sort of resource that she couldn't find when she first fell ill.