This month’s Menopause Support Group meeting is Wednesday October 15. Topic is -”Taking Care of the Girls- Reducing Breast Cancer Risk”
Who doesn’t know that October is Breast Cancer Awareness Month? This is a disease that has about the best media coverage and public relations promotions of any disease I can think of. I read an opinion that this is because there are so many breast cancer survivors who have a lot of energy after their treatment to promote awareness. This is unlike, say lung cancer, which actually kills more women but leaves less survivors. I think it may also be because in the past breast cancer truly was always a death sentence and still carries the lingering emotions of that terror. Survivors feel touched by death.
I personally felt that terror after being diagnosed with breast cancer last year. A very small non-invasive cancer was discovered in my left breast after a routine mammogram. No lump, no family history but there it was. If I had known at the time how easy the lumpectomy and radiation therapy would be, I would not have been so terrified. But I can tell you now, it turned out not to be a big deal for me. I was lucky. I did not need chemotherapy. I have survived some difficult things in my life, but I do not feel like a “breast cancer survivor”. A survivor is someone who has endured catastophe, like a hurricane or a life threatening disease. My disease got no where near life threatening. It is not at all likely that I will die from breast cancer.
I am one of a growing number of women whose disease was caught so early that it is not the monster it used to be. We can thank technology for that. That includes access to regular mammograms and better mammograms, better scientific knowledge about the disease and how to treat it. Key, too is a growing knowledge about how to prevent breast cancer. A generation ago breast cancer meant little choice but to have one’s breast loped off and weeks of debilitating treatments and more often than now, death. Now with early detection, it is possible to come through it with little more than a barely visable scar. With changes in life-style it may be prevented and many women will be spared. We each have the power to fight this disease with education about prevention and early detection.
I honor my sisters who have battled life threatening breast cancer and have survived or succumbed. I look forward to the next step in the battle in which someday the disease may be extinguished by a vaccine. And I honor all of you who have survived all the battles of life- death of loved ones, lost jobs, diabetes, heart disease, lupus, other cancers and so on. As Gilda Radner’s Rosanna Rosanadanna (who died of ovarian cancer) said, “It’s always something.” So I urge you to keep surviving whatever it is you are surviving. Continue to be brave and fight. Get your annual mammograms- and eat healthy, get exercise, stop smoking, limit or stop alcohol use, manage your stress, lose weight if you need to and, gosh darnit just take good care of yourself!
What have you survived? What advice do you have for someone going through a difficult time?
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