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make metastatic breast cancer matter
Reposted from March 23, 2012 in support of increasing awareness and support for Metastatic Breast Cancer research. Please visit METAvivor to learn about “The Elephant in the Pink Room.” Perhaps it is because my family history is bereft of breast cancer. Perhaps I was lulled into a false sense of security by three mammogram reports that lacked information about the density of my breasts. Whatever the reason, until my own diagnosis, I assumed that breast cancer was what happened to other women in other families. Such naïveté. Cancer always happens to people who are just like you and me. In fact, the Dr. Susan Love Research Foundation estimates that 70% of the women who have breast cancer,…
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blog action … deferred action
Blog Action Day is a global effort designed to promote discussion around a single issue that affects each of us. Since 2007, this annual event has inspired positive conversation in the blogosphere, with writers exploring universal topics related to our environment, poverty, climate change, water, and food. This year’s theme, The Power of We, provides an opportunity to define and celebrate the concept of community. How will we make our mark on the world? What will we do to make sure our children’s dreams come true? Everything in our power. I am reminded of a former student who graduated recently with an undergraduate degree in Psychology. Like me, she is an immigrant.…
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Uncategorized
breast cancer … not worth debating?
It is Breast Cancer Awareness Month. President Obama proclaimed it so on October 1, 2012. For added emphasis, the North Portico of the White House was illuminated pink for one evening. Basking in a ubiquitous pink glow, America’s most famous house reconfirms the power of the organization that bears the name of Nancy Brinker’s dead sister, Susan G. Komen, to deliver what Brinker once described as “conventional messages in unconventional ways in unexpected environments.” Given this logic, perhaps the presidential debate was “too conventional” a venue to raise the question of breast cancer. On top of that, there was that whole issue of the altitude in Denver . . . Incomprehensibly, it did not occur to Jim Lehrer, the…
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Uncategorized
so you say you want a revolution?
. . . so what are you going to do about it? It is Breast Cancer Awareness Month, but you already knew that. I imagine some of you are beyond aware, fatigued by the reiterated reassurances that early detection is the next best thing to curing breast cancer. Maybe the myth of mammogram as the perfect test is beginning to wear on you. You might even be quietly resigned to accepting “No Evidence of Disease” (NED) as good as it’s going to get. Breast cancer impinges on the lives of everyone you know, in ways not always immediately discernible, given the complexity of the disease, the politics of its lexicon, the business…
