While I was Out...

The New York Times had a good mid-October report on the pinking of America. Basically, it was about the rise of the upbeat Komen for the Cure... and its critics. Cancer Bitch has been a critic of Komen for being so large and media-glitzy but since 2008 it's been putting its funds into prevention and cure. Imagine that! Some good quotes:
The pink ribbons have become a distraction.--Karuna Jaggar, executive director, Breast Cancer Action
On Komen ads: It changes the focus of what we should be looking at to some advertising, marketing slogan. --Dr. Otis W. Brawley, chief medical officer of the American Cancer Society.
-We could prevent countless deaths if everyone got the same level of care as upper-class white women in Boston or New York.” --Dr. Eric P. Winer, director of the breast cancer program at the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute in Boston and chief scientific adviser for Komen.

And in today's (Tuesday's) Times*, there's a first-person piece by a doctor-professor who had the same stage cancer I did, 2A. Every year, she says, she checks a certain new edition of a medical textbook and consults its survival tables. There it is: Table 17-6. Average Survival of Patients With Breast Cancer by Stage.

It hasn’t changed a bit. Patients with breast cancer like mine, Stage IIA, still have a five-year survival rate of 70 percent (not great, but O.K.) and a 10-year rate of 50 percent (not good at all).

Her own doctor told her that her chances are much better than that, that the stats include those with "nasty" cancers. And I'm wondering why Feld had a lumpectomy and radiation and I had mastectomy and chemo. (Everyone's cancer is different. Of course. But I think the diff is that I had two tumors and there was no way to cut them out with clear margins and save the breast.)

We want to know. We want to know how much time we have. Which reminds me of one of the stories in Miriam Engelberg's memoir in comics, Cancer Made Me a Shallower Person. One of the things people say to someone with cancer, she wrote, is: After all, any of us could get hit by a bus tomorrow! She was, she recounts, actually hit by a bus once. Before she had cancer. She was OK. Without a scratch. I'm glad, of course, that I didn't die 15 years ago, thought it would have saved a lot of emotional anguish and nausea.
So she survived being hit by a bus. Then got breast cancer and died.

__________
*Cancer is like catnip for the Times. Or, to put it this way: Cancer is to the Times as World War II is to the New York Review of Books.

Read More

Teaching One-Breasted

Today was the second and last day of the workshops led by my students. I had to fill in for one of them for about 30 minutes today. I was wearing a long-sleeved hot pink shirt that clearly hugs my right breast and left non-breast. I'd been wearing it all day but hadn't spent much time in front of a crowd, though I had made quick announcements all day. I felt like there was something obscene about revealing my lack of breast in public. Which is interesting. I think revealing a nipple is officially obscene, and that's why go-go dancers have to wear tassels. Or used to have to. I looked all this stuff up years ago, when I was writing about Playboy--an article which, alas, never saw the light of day because my vision of it was different from my editor's. Anyway, pubic hair is or was obscene and that's why exotic dancers wore merkins, which are wigs that cover the pubic hair. Which is absurd. I don't know why pubic hair is obscene in the first place, because it's the stuff that covers the genitals. But I digress. I feel like I'm flaunting my one-breastedness, while at the same time I feel defiant: Hey, world, this is what breast cancer looks like. If one in seven or eight women will have breast cancer at some point in their lives, and if some of these women (I don't know what percent) will have a breast removed, cut out, slashed and scooped, amputated, what have you--then it seems that one-breasted women would therefore be fixtures in our grocery stores, offices, restaurants, classrooms and so on. Of course, they are all around us but they're wearing prostheses. Or they've had reconstruction and have been restored to double-breastedness. I don't know what percent opts for reconstruction. I don't even know if I'm going to opt for reconstruction.

You might say that the women who are padding one cup of their bras are opting for privacy. Or you could say they're being dishonest by covering up the results of surgery. You could also say that their breasts are a lot bigger than mine, and you'd be right. My remaining breast is small, and so it's easier for me to go without a bra, and easier for me to escape notice. How defiant would I be if I had a flatness on one side, and on the other side had a breast the size of a child's head?

To be perfectly accurate, I must say that I'm not flat-flat-flat on the left side. I had a skin-sparing mastectomy, so there's still a little roundness along the edges. I was floored a few months ago when a friend of a friend admired the image of Sarah Bernhardt on my close-fitting t-shirt, and then asked, as the conversation turned to cancer later, if I'd had surgery. Maybe he just wasn't a breast man. Maybe he was so entranced by the picture of Sarah that he didn't notice the asymmetry of the surface on which she was displayed.

So maybe no one noticed.

Now is when I should say that a pink ribbon that's fashioned out of plastic or fabric or metal or ceramic is much easier to look at than the half-empty chest of a real live woman. And that the widespread pollution that leads to cancer is what's truly obscene, and that my poor innocent body, which has been cut open and sewn back together, should be considered anything but.

Read More

Cancer Bitch Behaves Badly Again

I went to Caribou Coffee on my way to meet my friend F for lunch. There were bags of coffee for sale with pink ribbons on them. Part of the price goes to the Susan G. Komen foundation, which goes for--what? More pink ribbons, I suppose. I think Komen should sign on with Christo to wrap every woman with pink ribbons. Then it won't matter if they have breast cancer or not, because you won't be able to see it. As long as you can't see it, it's not a problem. And when they die, the survivors can turn the ribbons into a shroud.

Oh, where was I? Yes, Caribou does sell coffee with pink ribbons with some portion going to the Komen million-dollar ad campaign. (Really. That's true about the million dollars.) Too late to help Komen herself; she's daid. You can guess what killed her. Anyway, I asked what percentage went to the foundation, and the barista told me that the company had pledged $100,000 and she asked if I wanted to buy a bag of coffee, and I said no, that as someone with breast cancer I support an organization that researches the cause. Which is true but makes no sense. You think someone with breast cancer would be focused on cure. But I guess I'm just a selfless cancer bitch. I regret that I spoke to her in a tight, aggressive and aggrieved tone. I think she felt sorry for me because she offered me a Caribou scratcher card (Winner gets a free trip to Costa Rica!) and when I wasn't a winner she kept taking out more and more cards and scratching them even though there were people in line behind me. Finally after a half dozen cards she gave up.

I've been to Costa Rica.. I went with N in the late 1980s. I didn't have a good time there, even though we saw monkeys and lizards and the beach, because I have trouble having a good time on vacation. I get struck with ennui and the meaningless of everything. When L and I travel it always has to be to a place with a coffee house so that I can work.

I will let an honorary cancer bitch, Canadian professor Samantha King, have the last words here, from her book, Pink Ribbons, Inc: Breast Cancer and the Politics of Philanthropy: "As the Komen Foundation and its corporate sponsors continue to pump money into a research and education agenda that centers on uncritically promoting mammography, encouraging the use of pharmaceuticals to 'prevent' breast cancer, and avoiding any consideration of environmental links to the disease it becomes less clear whether they are not actually doing more harm than good...."

Read More