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As a long-time cancer survivor, I'm of two minds (or more) re: the hub-bub about the Pink month (which seems to go on all year now):
- I appreciate and respect breast-cancer survivors who have come out having had the disease and encouraged more women (and men) to get regular mammograms, do self-exams, etc. Anything that builds communication, awareness and acceptance is positive.
- It is worth noting that, in raising funds for their disease, however, that they're not the first on the block to become activists. The HIV/AIDs populations were. And they became in-your-face, bonafide
activists out of a dire need for treatment options. Nowadays the kinder-gentler term is "advocate"--perhaps most of us survivors don't have/feel the same sense of outrage and urgency that those early AIDs activists did. (Who did the ribbons first? Remember the red AIDS ribbons everyone wore to the Oscars years and years ago?)
- However, I do cringe when it's all breast cancer all the time...ONLY because other cancers and life-threatening diseases/conditions don't get the same treatment. Until a year or so ago, the FDA had only approved a couple of drugs to treat renal cell carcinoma (the most common form of kidney cancer), the type of cancer from which I'm in remission. Let me be blunt: how many kidney cancer patients (and those with more obscure but equally deadly diseases) died because research funds that could have gone to their disease went to yet another marginally effective, palliative treatment option for breast cancer?
- So I do give to breast cancer causes. But I request birthday and Christmas donations in my name to the Kidney Cancer Association in lieu of presents and have contributed recipes for a fund-raising cookbook.
And, most of all, I hope for a day when walk-a-thons and other fundraisers for cancer are no longer needed because we're no longer losing good women and men to this horrific collection of diseases.
