She Loves Her Gadgets
Dr. Susan Love is this country’s best known and most outspoken advocate for women’s health issues concerning breast cancer. Her book, “Dr. Susan Love’s Breast Book,” is a bestseller in the field, and her follow-up tome, “Dr. Susan Love’s Hormone Book,” takes the somewhat controversial stance that hormone replacement therapy for women is overrated. She speaks widely on these subjects and has testified on several occasions before Congress.
She was the founding director of the Revlon/UCLA Breast Center and brought that institution to national prominence. She quit in 1996 after four years in the position to pursue an MBA and begin new ventures, including a Web site on women’s health.
Love, 52, lives with her partner, retired surgeon Helen Cooksey, in Pacific Palisades.
COMPUTER: I have a Sony VAIO that is my only computer, with a keyboard and flat panel monitor at home and at the office to plug into. I travel so much, it made sense for me to put everything on a laptop. I got the VAIO because it was the first one that was really skinny and lightweight and could fit into my briefcase.
I tend to be an early adopter. In fact, I wanted this computer so bad that I got my first one from Japan before it officially arrived in this country. On the keys, there are Japanese letters as well as English. I had to have the very first Palm Pilot too.
Q. But gadgets always seem to get better and cheaper after being introduced.
I know. Maybe it’s some kind of doctor thing: the love of gadgets, the need to be on the cutting edge. I hate to admit it, but I’ve had this computer for two years and I’m getting on the verge of buying a new one. The one I have is fine, but God forbid I should stay with it.
Q. What do you mostly use it for?
Writing. I do a lot of writing for my Web site.
Q. How is that venture going?
We have sponsors, but you can’t survive on that. So we’ve just morphed SusanLoveMD.com, which is basically a breast cancer and menopause site, into a larger company that will handle speaking engagements, do multimedia. It’s the Martha Stewart model, but on women’s health.
The new company is called Iluminari. I’m a founder and senior partner.
Q. On the site, you invite women with questions on breast cancer and other health issues to e-mail you and your staff.
We get about 40 e-mails a day from the site, and we have three nurse practitioners who answer them, but I review each answer before it goes out. Personally, I get about 100 e-mails a day, and they can really pile up. My New Year’s resolution is to never keep more than 100 e-mails in my box at one time. My new motto is: “Answer it, delete it or file it.”
HAND-HELD: I now have the Palm Vx, and I like it a lot. I also have the OmniSky service for wireless e-mail, and it’s great. I can take the train from Delaware [where Iluminari is headquartered] to New York and do my e-mail on the train.
I knew I was going to love it when I was stuck in traffic in San Jose, trying to catch the last flight home. I plugged my modem into the Palm and found out the flight was running 45 minutes late. It was wonderful; I could relax.
Also on the Palm, I have an exercise and diet program where you write down everything you eat. It’s actually really fun.
And I have a bunch of solitaire games to get me through boring meetings.
BOOKMARKED SITES: Amazon. I buy a lot of CDs, mostly classical and lesbian women’s music, which is just called women’s music now. But back in the days when I was coming out in the 1970s, it was a separate category that was very important to us.
And there is a site called Title 9 [https://www.title9sports.com] where you can buy women’s sport clothes. I’m training for the Los Angeles Marathon, so I’m buying that kind of stuff now.
I don’t do much Net surfing, other than to sometimes check some stocks I have.
CELL PHONE: Here’s an example of how being an early adopter sometimes doesn’t work out well. When it first came out, I used something called a REX on the back of my cell phone that was supposed to be an address book and things like that. It turned out to not be very useful.
Now I just use a [Motorola] StarTAC, and it works fine. I just ordered solar batteries for it.
FAVORITE TECH TOY: My favorite of the moment is an MP3 player that I got for Christmas, and it works so well. I can download my favorite music on it and it never skips--it’s just great. And it was so easy to use. For all my love of gadgets, I’m not that adept at making them work.
Q. What about the questions raised by downloading copyrighted songs?
Everything I’ve downloaded so far are things I’ve already bought on CDs. I don’t feel like I’m cheating anyone--I buy a lot of CDs.
My other favorite thing is the GPS [Global Positioning System] unit I have in the car. You punch an address into its little pad and it gives you directions, telling you when to turn right, turn left. You’ll never get lost again. It’s programmed with a woman’s voice, so my sister named her Helga.
She’s wonderful. She never yells at you if you make a wrong turn; she just reroutes you. And she is very polite. I can’t imagine buying another car without one.
*
--As told to DAVID COLKER
