Dr. Guru meets with my family in the waiting room. Big grin, face mask dangling around his neck, arms raised, two fingers on each hand formed into the V for victory signs. No cancer in frozen lymph node section. So far everyone agrees. Big wide margins. Some heard only “wide” margins, but not “big wide” margins. One thought he said only “good margins.” Another does not recall anything about margins.
Whatever he said, everyone is jubilant. The cancer “episode” is over. The drive home takes 20 minutes. We stop to fill a prescription: a small brown plastic container filled with — Wow — FIFTY Percocet! Good bye pain I don’t have. Hello euphoria.
In the living room, the mantel above the fire place is filled with flower arrangements. Calla lilies, Gerber daisies, roses of all kinds, delphiniums, chrysanthemums, hydrangeas, and freesias fill the air with their perfume, lots of get well cards.
Our family lounges in the sofas and chairs around the large coffee table. Snacks and munchies are brought in . After all, it is dinner time. Wine is poured for everyone but me. (I get water. One indication that all is not fully back to normal.) A couple of neighbors stop buy. The phone rings. A friend brings over a water melon salad and a chicken salad. My sister in law brings a bag of fresh bagels from Goldberg’s along with various spreads. The atmosphere is that of a festive wake.
Normally, during casual family gatherings or Sunday dinners, people arrive late or leave early. Some excuse themselves to check emails, or make cell phone calls, turn on the TV to catch the last few minutes of some game, or sneak away to play billiards downstairs. All signs of a certain restlessness, an eagerness to escape the tight family noose. Not today.
Like on Christmas Eve, everyone remains seated: content and mellow, we bask in the glow of togetherness. I feel their warmth and concern, happiness about the outcome. We even play a few hands of my favorite card game in a concession to my status as Queen for a Day. (Although they don’t let me win.)
At 11 PM, I go upstairs to prepare for bed. I am not particularly tired and I feel no discomfort. Dutifully I swallow a Percocet because my husband reminds me of the nurse’s wisdom: “Take them before you start to hurt. It is easier to prevent pain than to chase it away. ” Plus who wants to hear “I told you so” should I wake up wreathing in pain.
When I roll over on my side, I feel a tighness, tenderness, in my swollen, bruised breast. A pleasant reminder that I still have that breast, and that it is now tumor free. Post operative treatment options are completely off my radar screen as I drift off to a night of uninterupted, dreamless sleep.
Before my diagnosis, I paid no attention to pink bows, the symbol for breast cancer awareness. But now that I have been initiated into the pink bow sisterhood, I see pink constantly and everywhere. It is obviously a powerful marketing tool.
Water bottles, T-shirts, hats, and slippers are decorated with pink bows. There are pink bows on candy such as Tic Tacs and M & Ms.
Even Fleischman’s yeast packages and Morton’s salt display pink bows. The pink bows are usually accompanied by statements like: “Each purchase helps fight breast cancer” or “Purchasing this package will support efforts to find a cure for breast cancer.” Valerie, a consumer realtion’s representative for Fleischman’s Yeast writes that me: “Our donation will range from a minimum of $100,000 to a maximum of $200,000 depending on the amount of registered products.” This is certainly a good contribution although she does not specify which organization that gets the donation or what the profits are on yeast envelopes sold because of the pink bow. Morton’s salt does not respond to my inquiry regarding their support of breast cancer.
I find heads of cauliflower at the grocery store – and not in the organic section, either – each wrapped in cellophane with small pink bow and a link to a web site where you can learn what the cauliflower does for the “cure.” (Presumably it contributes more than antioxidants.) Heads of broccoli come with a pink bow printed on the cellophane wraps and an assurance that Andy Boy, the grower in Salinas, CA, is in “Proud Support of The Breast Cancer Research Foundation.”
7 Eleven sells boxes of donuts with pink ribbon sprinkles and 15 cents per donut goes to Susan G. Komen for breast cancer research. How much goes to diabetes prevention programs?
Delta Airlines sold $2 cans of pink lemonade on their transcontinental flight from Atlanta to San Francisco “in honor of breast cancer.” (How much did the near-bankrupt airline donate to the cause?)
The breast cancer awareness postal stamp was the nation’s first fund-raising stamp, according to the U.S. Postal Service. It cost more than the normal First-Class stamp so that net proceeds could go to the cause. Thirty percent of of the net proceeds went to the Medical Research program of the Department of Defense. Does WMD stand for Women Massively Deceived?
Well, the defense department did use the money for breast cancer research. But why the Department of Defense? What is the Department of Health and Human Services doing? one wonders. What could possibly be the link between the defense department and breast cancer? Is the defense department really the ideal department to lead the lion’s share of research into such an important women’s health issue?
Once you are aware of the pink bow mania, you can not escape all the products and organizations involved in rooting for “the cure”and their promotion of “awareness.” You have to ask yourself, how much money is really contributed to breast cancer research, and who gets the money for doing what?
Join “Think Before You Pink” and support the fight for breast cancer prevention. If shopping were the solution, we would already have a cure. http://www.thinkbeforeyoupink.org/
Thursday, I only have one thing on my mind, one thought circling my brain like a hungry wolf. I want to go under Dr. Guru’s scalpel, I need for him to get rid of my nasty, ugly tumor. Now.
Not a word from Dr. Guru’s office. Not a word about the MRI results. Not a word [...]
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At lunch before my doctor’s appointment, Marie gives me a care package: one of the presents is a blue vinyl journal with a cheerful green flap to close under a pink loop (I do not connect the pink loop with the pink cancer bow. Somehow I am still able to ignore the pink breast [...]
Before my scheduled check-up with my new gynecologist, I have lunch at my friend Marie’s invitation. She picks Anise, one of my favorite lunch places, one with so many memories of earlier, happier, days when Marie and I both had sons and our sons were both in the International School, a few hundred yards away.
As [...]
On my drive home from the office mulling over my new diagnosis, I try to think of names of doctors I can ask. My friend B’s husband is a vascular surgeon, he ought to know. But they have left for some medical conference on Corsica. My friend Elise’s husband Dan is a doctor. He teaches [...]
Thirty minutes earlier, I was told I have breast cancer. It is at moments like this you turn to your friends.
I throw myself on the phone to call Marie and Cecilia. Normally, I don’t like to talk about anything personal on my office phone. I am in an office landscape and everyone hears and knows [...]
Although the possibility that I may have cancer has loomed for weeks, months if you include the time I wasted after I discovered the lump, my diagnosis takes me by such a surprise that I do not have a single question for the radiologist when she calls and gives me the biopsy result. And she [...]
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