After working in New England for a stint, today started with
a 4:30am alarm to catch a 7:00 flight out of Boston’s Logan Airport.
Boston is busy. It is history and traffic and marathons and
Cheers. I have become acquainted with the Freedom Trail, the Italian food of
the North End and the tangled mess of roads and tunnels. I’ve also found my
inner strength to walk by the Dunkin’ Donuts in the airport terminal with only
minor tongue twitches and pangs. Boston’s
airport has become familiar, but today it was different. All of the Delta
employees’ uniforms have a splash of pink.
One gate representative had a silky pink handkerchief in his
breast pocket and another, a bold distinguished rosy tie. Ha! And as I type on the plane, the flight
attendant announces, “In honor of Breast Cancer Awareness Month, we are
offering pink lemonade for a $2 donation to the Breast Cancer Research
Foundation. We also have a pink lady available, which is a cold cocktail with
vodka and lemonade.” It is 5:30am back
home. A pink lady is not going to
increase my awareness of anything at this hour. Coffee, please.
I have known a number of women personally and peripherally
who have had breast cancer. Some have survived. Some have not. I’ve hit the age
of annual mammograms, and now I understand the comparison to lying on a cold
cement floor and having a Ford F150 roll right on over the girls. Contemplating
the alternatives makes this bearable.
A few Decembers ago, I was at a Christmas party working on
my social skills and party banter when I struck up a conversation with a friend
who is a gynecologist. Nothing will test your social skills like chatting with
a gynecologist. My birthday falls during the week before Christmas, so that’s easy
and fun to talk about—for me anyway. The conversation went something like this.
Dr: How are you?
Me: Great! In addition to the holidays, it’s also my
birthday season so great days are easy to come by. How are you?
Dr: Well, you know how October is Breast Cancer Awareness
Month? Well, that means I spend November and December telling a lot of women
that their tests came back positive. This
was a rough week. There were a lot of “positives”. She gestured with fingered quotes
and a pained grimace at the biting sarcasm.
Whoa. I had never considered this side of the pink. That is
when I’d like to have an ice cold pink lady in each hand, one to share and one to
swig. We talked a bit more about cancer and an awareness month. She wished it could be a different month, but
when is a good time to tell someone they have cancer? When is a good time to
hear it? There are no good times, but there is a better time: early.
When she gets to diagnose someone early, she can better hold
the same hope that becomes the one-word mantra of every cancer patient and their
loved ones.
Which of my friends’ stories do I tell here? There are too
many for this space. Within months of my 20 year high school reunion, two of my
classmates who attended had double mastectomies. It was staggering to read their
trials on Facebook so soon after our weekend reminiscing about our immortal
youth. I’ve known one of these women since third grade and the other, Katie, since
seventh.
Katie had her third baby this July. She’s shared her thrills
as well as her anguish of guilt and feeling judged for not being able to breast
feed. She moved from New England to Texas following her mastectomy and before
the little guy’s birth, so her new medical team didn’t know her history. The
lactation consultant was just doing her job when she popped in to see how
things were going. My dear friend
continued on auto-pilot with a cordial explanation of why there was no
lactating going on. They are gone.
But Katie is here, and she is another side of all this pink.
We will wear ribbons this month. We’ll give a few extra
bucks here the and there. Manly men among us will don sharp pink dress shirts
and there will be races and drives and billboards, oh my. If this sea of pink
makes you a little nauseous, you’ll smirk or scream when you reach for the pepto
bismol. Eeek! More pink!
Will a color save a life or a breast? Will a ribbon? Will a newspaper?
Will a rhyming tagline? Well, when it’s “self exams and mammograms” the latter
just might.
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