Breast cancer awareness month is waning. Last week, at my neighborhood post office, I stood in line staring at a battered, two-foot-long, cardboard pink ribbon taped to the wall. Holding my nephew’s birthday present, waiting for my turn, gazing at the decoration’s tattered edges and sloppy tape, I felt – nothing.
I am post-pink ribbon. I just don’t give a f**k. Anger spent on pink ignorance zaps my energy. I want to channel my energy into life. Theresa Brown summed up the pink insult in yesterday’s New York Times, “Pink is about femininity; cancer is about staying alive.”
In December 2015, my friend Cindy was diagnosed with breast cancer. She had a lumpectomy, radiation, and chemotherapy. We talked on the phone. We compared notes on treatment side effects. We walked her dog. She got through it with grace and wit. She returned to work. All seemed well.
Six months later she had an odd pain in her rib cage. Worry chafed her voice as she described the sensation. I don’t remember what I said. I tried to be optimistic without being dismissive. We both lived with the fear of metastasis. We both knew what bone pain might mean.
Two weeks ago I was reading Sherman Alexie’s beautiful new memoir, “You Don’t Have to Say You Love Me.” when this passage jumped out at me:
Nobody defeats cancer. There is no winning or losing. There is no surviving or not surviving. There are only coin flips: heads or tails; benign or malignant; weight loss or bloating; morphine or oxycodone; extreme rescue efforts or Do Not Resuscitate; live or die.
Cindy lost the coin flip. Her cancer had spread to her bones.
Before Cindy was my friend, she was my physical therapist. She restored the range of motion in my left arm after radiation. She released the scar tissue across my chest from my double mastectomy. She reduced the swelling in my arm when lymphedema settled in for a visit. She was one of the most compassionate and talented healers I’d ever met and I’ve met quite a few.
She’d rubbed shoulders with the disease most of her life. Her mother had suffered from breast cancer. Cindy had spent much of her career as a physical therapist helping breast cancer patients regain freedom in their post-treatment bodies.
Cindy was in her late 50s when she was diagnosed. She had a son in college, a daughter in high school. We often talked about the future, her excitement about her new solo physical therapy practice and her dream of spending more quality time with her husband now that her children were grown.
Cindy died this month. She was 61.
Reject the commodification of women’s pain
Anyone who has lost a loved one to this disease knows breast cancer is not pink; to festoon kitty litter, vibrators, and fire engines with pink ribbons eats away at the gravitas of this disease. It’s the opposite of awareness; it’s erasure.
Breast cancer is about staying alive. Who lives and who dies has nothing to do with who “fights like a girl” or who “kicks cancer’s ass.” Staying alive is a coin toss. This year 40,610 women in the U.S. will lose their coin flip with breast cancer. Let’s focus on them.
