Fire Walk With Me

galesofnovember:

And I am so down with that.  

HOWEVER,  I am not okay with talking about how the commodification of breast cancer “steal” or takes attention away from lesser studied cancers or  arguments that forget the history of breast cancer activism.

There was a time when people wouldn’t even tell their families that they had breast cancer.  There was time when there was so much shame and silence that women would die with no one knowing that they had been sick.  There was a time when women went under for a biopsy and woke up with radical double mastectomies, which again,  they could get no support for because even saying the word “breast” in public was scandalous  

A lot of women fought really, really hard to raise awareness about breast cancer,  to support screenings and to demand that doctors communicate with patients before just slicing off their breasts. 

There’s plenty of reasons to hate pink ribbons,  but if you don’t give the women who fought so hard for so long then you’re a jerk.  And if you even allude to the idea that these women were meanie pants who stole funding away from other diseases (esp if you, and I have seen people do this!!!! talk about prostate cancer as a victim of breast cancer awareness)  you are a total asshole. 

Ovarian cancer, though. It hasn’t had a new drug developed in 15 years. Is so much less treatable than Breast Cancer. The majority of Ovarian cancer patients have an under 35% chance of survival. And it’s got almost no awareness. Do you know what the ribbon color for Ovarian Cancer is? (it’s teal, fyi)

Ovarian cancer usually has no detectable symptoms until it spreads to other organs (and is thereby practically unstoppable). There are no screening tests. Usually patients are diagnosed when their entire abdomen fills up with tumor and they have to go in and cut out huge chunks of your organs everywhere to try to surgically cure you, since drugs are much less effective than they are for Breast Cancer.

The same Genetic mutations that increase the probability of Breast Cancer, BRCA1 and BRCA2, also increase the probability of Ovarian cancer; yet they are colloquially known as the “Breast Cancer Genes”. 

I give a lot of credit to the women who fought for Breast Cancer treatment and a reduction of stigma - I just really wish more attention could be turned, now, to cancers that desperately need new treatments, now that Breast Cancer is such a comparatively survivable disease.

(via isabelthespy)