Breast Cancer Awareness Month

By AM Tuesday, October 26, 2010

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Breast cancer, like all its evil brethren, is an indiscriminate killer, the great leveller waging what seems an unrelenting modern war on young and old - Shelley Fralic, Vancouver Sun.

October is Breast Cancer Awareness Month. Despite the prevalence of the disease I never gave it much thought. I have a recollection of the fight in an English courtroom by a woman in the early stages of the illness seeking to have the NHS fund the drug Herceptin, thinking that it was a disgrace that public finances could not be provided for public health care. A few months ago I browsed through an internet list of well known women who had died from beast cancer, but thought little more of it. Like most other shoppers I could not fail to see the pink ribbons and bags on display in supermarkets but invariably failed to buy any. What spare change I had would usually find its way to some collection bucket or tin on my way out of the store. Even on Saturday in town I gave to the Irish Wheelchair Association after leaving the till area which was well peppered with ‘pink’ breast cancer merchandise.

Then a friend of a friend contacted me via the internet and told me of his passion for keeping the issue in the public eye. His wife had come through the illness and has since spent a year in the clear. He suggested I flag it up in some way. Although pretty much agnostic on the matter, given the manifold causes that could be pushed, I thought I would vent some thoughts on it despite knowing that breast cancer is a high profile illness already. The type of carcinoma is probably one of the more frequently discussed cancers that affect women. As far back as 2001 Barbara Ehrenreich pointed this out:

Thirty years ago, before Betty Ford, Rose Kushner, Betty Rollin, and other pioneer patients spoke out, breast cancer was a dread secret, endured in silence and euphemized in obituaries as a "long illness." Something about the conjuncture of "breast," signifying sexuality and nurturance, and that other word, suggesting the claws of a devouring crustacean, spooked almost everyone. Today however, it's the biggest disease on the cultural map, bigger than AIDS, cystic fibrosis, or spinal injury, bigger even than those more prolific killers of women -- heart disease, lung cancer, and stroke.

Despite this prominence in public health discourse and my suspicions of the pink phenomenon resembling a cult where dissent from the prescribed modes of behaviour in responding to it is ‘a kind of treason’, as alleged by Ehrenreich, it struck me that a month dedicated to increasing awareness about it can only be a good thing. For as Shelley Fralic, now lump-free, after a 1987 scare, argued in the Vancouver Sun, every day of the year is about breast cancer awareness for women. She adds that:

the most recent data from the Canadian Cancer Society indicate that one in nine women will get breast cancer; one in 28 will not survive it … we read obituaries and pause on the photos of beautiful young women and know, without even reading the details, that breast cancer is the culprit.

In Ireland 2,500 women are diagnosed with the illness each year. Viewed in those terms it is a stalker worse than any serial killer we may read about in the tabloids.

Cancer is something I am familiar with due to both parents having died from it, a sister surviving it, another sister’s husband being claimed by it, and numerous aunts, uncles and cousins having it marked down on their death certificates. I remain unsure what side of the line I fall on in terms of causal factors, genetic or environmental. A case study of cancer during a technology course in prison helped nudge me in the direction of seeing it as environmental; that long term effective treatment would be applied socially rather than to individual biological structures; that a cure as such would not be found but if we could change the way we lived the preventative effects would be so great that the elusive code to cracking the curse might no longer seem so pressing.

Yet I am not a campaigner nor am I about to become an ‘unrelenting crusader’ on this issue. I simply had my curiosity aroused to the point of following my nose. Consequently I read Barbara Ehrenreich’s engaging, critical, challenging and provocatively stimulating 2001 essay in Harper's Magazine, 'Welcome to Cancerland', which detailed her experience of the disease including the discovery stage which she described as ‘the fog of anaesthesia that hangs over those first few weeks.’ Hers, as well as being combative, was a nuanced perspective which goes ignored or marginalised in the surface discourse.

Nevertheless, if addressing the issue so much as helps in some way to prompt one woman to take a mammogram whom otherwise might not have, or to pay greater attention during self-examination, it will be a worthwhile accomplishment. I know I will insist on my daughter at home who is not yet ten, taking all necessary measures as she grows up to ensure that she increases her chances of evading this particular attacker. Awareness leads to alertness which in turn enhances preventative potential, allowing people to confront, fragment, dissipate and ultimately head off the disease at the first defensive echelon where it has less chance of establishing a beachhead from which to launch its deadly invasive salvoes.

Women’s breasts are more important to their long term health and wellbeing than their teeth. The same attention should be paid to mammary self examination as to oral hygiene. Little point in beating a lost breast in anguished regret after a mastectomy.