Throwback: Pink Ribbons, Komen, Planned Parenthood...nothing is ever really what it seems...

The postings on this site are my own and do not necessarily represent the views of the

American Cancer Society.

When I was 16, I lifeguarded.  I used a lot of towels between swim lessons, work outs, and dips in the cool water on 107 degree days.  As the summer wore on, my towels wore out. Eventually I ended up at some giant housewares boxed store looking for a towel.

I didn’t have a lot of money. I needed a cheap, durable towel. A thick one, thick enough to take a beating and repeated dryings.  I didn’t find one in the towel section, but as I browsed the store, I saw an end cap with pink ribbon towels. It was 10 bucks for a nice, huge pink towel with bright pink ribbons; all proceeds going to the Breast Cancer Research Foundation. This was the towel I bought. It came with a shower card that I hung in my shower.

Every day, the rest of that summer, I wrapped myself in this pink towel. Every day, I stared at the shower card. Every day, I thought about my breasts, and I got to know them.  No self exams really, I just felt them, and I knew them... They were a part of my geography. Something I didn’t take for granted.

Six years later, I was off at school, nearly insurance-less.  I lay in bed and I felt my breasts as I had been doing for years, my pink towel hanging on my door.  I felt a lump. It stuck out from the map of my breast: a boulder in a smooth road. I waited a month. It grew, and it grew. I could feel it shifting beneath my fingers.  Eventually, my husband made me an appointment at the school health clinic. I went in and the nurse practitioner spent ten minutes telling me it was nothing, and her face spent 5 seconds telling me it was something.

I was 21 when I was diagnosed with breast cancer. I knew to check myself because of the towel, the card, and a million of other things people take for granted. Herceptin, a drug targeted to a protein on my tumor cells, had just come out. It increased the chances of my survival and continued health dramatically.  I took tamoxifen for five years.  These were the drugs weren’t around at the beginning of breast cancer. They took research and funding and a pink ribbon. A lot of women died while they were being researched. I can’t ever forget them. These women held on for the hope that the next treatment would be the one to keep them here a little longer.

So, friends, when you disparage the ribbon and the research and the month, I just ask you this. Think of that 16 year old kid, that 21 year old kid who would have been another young survivor statistic (diagnosed too late, under or un-insured). Remember that we don’t have a cure for all breast cancers yet. Remember the human face of this disease. Remember that all that research is valuable, and remember that the pink ribbon saved at least one life.

Komen, I also have something to say to you. If I hadn’t been at school, I would have been in a Planned Parenthood for that exam.  As you know, mammograms don’t accurately detect breast cancer in women under 40. Women under 40 (like poor women, black women, and Hispanic women)are more likely to be uninsured or underinsured. Women under 40 (like poor women, black women, and Hispanic women) are more likely to be diagnosed at a later stage. Women under 40 (like poor women, black women, and Hispanic women) are more likely to die from the disease. That exam by the NP was all I had standing between me and a statistic. It saved my life. Planned Parenthood doctors using the same exam save lives every day in a population drastically under served by the rest of the medical community.

I’m the person your grand statistics on the validity of care doesn’t show. I’m part of the invisible minority of breast cancer. Your recent decision looks suspicious, and I cannot trust you. You helped me when I was first diagnosed, you helped fund research that kept me alive a little longer, but your lack of attention to me and those like me lost much my support years ago.  This most recent decision of yours was its death blow. Your explanations hollow, forced, and ununited. So I am left, as I have been much of the way, by myself facing an uncertain future of side effects and a second cancer, alone.

February 3, 2011, 12:24 AM.