Comment of the Week
September 20th, 2010
This past week on my facebook page, we have been collecting all the craptacular pink stuff that floods the store shelves in honor of October, also known as Breast Cancer Awareness month.
Apparently this is breast cancer “season.” And it’s time to party.
Part of the idea of this game is to point out the bizarre inequity of corporate sponsorship of cancer research. People love breasts so companies are comfortable with the cute pink ribbons and their mammaric associations. There is no parity for other body parts that get cancers that are often more lethal, like anal, colon, or pancreatic.
This comment from Denise McConachie sums up the consequences of this inequity beautifully:
Ah yes. Breast Cancer – The Golden Child of the Cancer Family. Her little brother, Colon Cancer, sits back in the shadows, pouting a little, while big sis hogs all the media time and has all the fun parties.
I’ve had both. It’s amazing the difference in the packages of information I got from each surgeon. The breast cancer folder came complete with calendars, notepads, excercises and even a best selling book about breast cancer treatment my surgeon co-wrote.
With the colon cancer… I got a hand drawn diagram of the section they were taking out.
This entry was posted on Monday, September 20th, 2010 at 7:46 am and is filed under Humor, Treatment. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.
Amen!
When I was looking for financial assistance when I got uterine cancer (if I got a ribbon, I would expect it to be the color of a blood clot) I was told I was out of luck but if I had had breast cancer there would be all kinds of financial assistance available.
I had a very rare sarcoma, and I don’t really resent that there’s little publicity for a cancer that strikes barely 100 people in the US per year. But it does bother me that there’s only financial assistance for certain kinds of cancer; uterine cancer is just as serious as breast cancer, and just as ravaging, and just as random and unfair as any other sort.
it’s very difficult when you have an orphan cancer. my brother had one. i saw how difficult (and different) his treatment was compared to mine. there was way more data for me to use to make medical decisions. his involved a lot of guesswork. part of my goal is to raise awareness about the unequal distribution of resources for research. even if you look at research dollars per death, breast cancer gets about 3 times more than more lethal cancers like pancreatic cancer. i think a breast cancer patient — who owes her life to corporate sponsored research — is in a better position to call attention to this than somebody with a rarer cancer.
we don’t get to choose what kind of cancer we get.