Tag: Research Funding

^{(Title image: Photo by Pawel Czerwinski on Unsplash)}

It’s that time of the year again.

I won’t lie, I have mixed feelings about the color pink these days, along with October’s “breast cancer awareness” paraphernalia popping up in stores, in promotions and all over social media. Some of us don’t need the reminder that breasts get cancer.

Breast cancer is probably the most popularized cancer there is, and I’m willing to bet that’s in part because there is a giddiness associated with yelling “SAVE THE BOOBIES” and not getting into trouble for it. It is also the most funded cancer (McIntosh et al., 2023, Lancet, for example) but to be fair, also one of the most common.

So you would think that by now I would be very accepting of all the pink ribbons on yogurt and fizzy drinks and whatnot. But amidst the rah-rah, October also brings with it the memories of feeling very alone with my disease. Once the chemo and radiation were done, I found myself wading through a new phase of life that I wasn’t prepared for.

I thought I was “done”. And so did everyone else. But dealing with continued Herceptin infusions along with an uncertain future of endocrine therapy frustrated me because I felt I still had an excuse to feel crappy, but no one else thought I did.

And even with that frustration, I have a lot to be grateful for.

All the pink stuff and smiling faces have been so important in bringing so much generous funding to breast cancer research, which has resulted in great strides being made. There are other cancers that are painfully underfunded (for instance, pancreatic cancer, which also has high mortality rates), and I would be lying if I said that I didn’t feel some guilt about that. I cannot gripe about all the pink too much, because I am the beneficiary of all the money that has poured in.

Specifically, my triple-positive breast cancer was actually considered quite aggressive, but research resulted in new pharmaceuticals that have de-fanged that type of breast cancer and resulted in high survival rates. Even my oncologist remarked that he couldn’t remember the last time a HER2-positive patient of his suffered a recurrence, and he’s in his 70s. That says a lot.

So it seems disingenuous of me to lament all the screaming pink at the store. It seems equally disingenuous of me to wonder how much cancer took away from me that I would still have right now. Because one thing it didn’t take away was my life, and not everyone is that fortunate. Remembering that puts everything into perspective.