There's nothing like a little benign news to start the day, nothing like a voice on the other end of the phone saying, "the pathology on your biopsy came back and everything is benign. We'll see you in one year for your next appointment."

While my dermatologist was freezing the pre-cancerous actinic keratoses lesions on my nose last week, she decided to cut out a suspicious chunk of skin on my hand. It was much worse than the freezing. She gave me a shot and numbed the area and then literally dug a hole into the skin just below the pinkie finger on my right hand. For days now, I've been applying antibiotic ointment, bandaging the wound, and whining about the twinges of pain that shoot through my hand.

My hand is still sore today. But I don't have skin cancer. And that makes the pain a whole lot more tolerable.

While the effectiveness of a seaweed extract acting as a potent inhibitor of human papilloma viruses, HPV, that can lead in some cases to cervical cancer, has not been tested in any human clinical trials -- in the lab it has impressed the National Cancer Institute researchers who have been studying it.

According to researchers, carrageenan extracted from marine red algae (seaweed) showed a thousand-fold greater potency compared with other inhibitors they have tested in halting HPV.

Dr. John Schiller, senior investigator at the National Cancer Institute, who was involved in the development of the HPV vaccine, made the carrageenan discovery.

Schiller cautions that the results do not prove that carrageenan will work as a practical HPV topical microbicide. However, the positive results in the lab, together with the fact that carrageenan-based over-the-counter products are already available -- make carrageenan look even more promising to researchers in blocking the sexual transmission of HPV.

The new cervical cancer vaccine is effective for about 70 percent of the HPV viruses that can cause cervical cancer. It is also an expensive vaccine that might prove cost prohibitive for low-income women in economically distressed countries. The researchers think, if carrageenan proves as effective in human clinical trails as it has in the lab, the inexpensive carrageenan could be a significant benefit in the prevention of HPV.

One researcher, Dr. Connie Trimble, an HPV researcher at Johns Hopkins University, feels so positive about the recent advancements and discoveries in relation to cervical cancer that she said, "With all the potential tools now, we could really start to think about the end of cervical cancer. Between the vaccines and some of the prophylactics -- wouldn't that be a medical success story!"

Before my radiation for breast cancer, I heard horror stories about the treatment. I heard that I might be extremely tired and severely burned and that I might feel generally unwell for the time it would take to completely zap any and all traces of cancer surrounding my breast. But my own radiation wasn't all that bad -- and really, the worst part of the whole therapy for me was the drive to and from the cancer center every day for seven weeks. It was a hassle, a nuisance, a bother. There were other small annoyances throughout the course of my radiation, but they were minimal -- thanks to some secrets that were shared with me along the scorching path of radiation and beyond. And here are seven of them.