Give up hope! The Breast Cancer Deadline 2020

From the National Breast Cancer Coalition makes a damn good point - there has been no end game, no deadline, no accountabiliy in the fight against breast cancer. It’s too open-ended. When’s the last time you saw an ill-defined, open-ended battle won?

Hope? Hope didn’t get us to the moon. We had a commitment. A defined goal. A deadline. We cured polio in just seven years.

Hope.

For decades, we’ve been fighting breast cancer with hope. For decades, the lives of our daughters, mothers, and friends have been in the hands of hope.

It isn’t working. In 1991 the number of American women that died of breast cancer every day was 119. Today it’s about the same - 110 deaths. Every single day. Twenty years. No significant progress.

Today we give up hope. It’s the most optimistic step ever taken in the history of the breast cancer battle.

Today we set a goal. Today we set a deadline. January 1, 2020. The end of breast cancer. Hope is a wish. The deadline is a commitment. Hope says whenever. The deadline says within ten years. What if we fail? We already have. What about pink? It’s time to show our true colors. Ten years is too short? We ended polio in seven.

A deadline changes everything. No experiment, no charity, no lab, no doubt, no promise, no critic, no iota of research can occur outside of its context. Today the conversation changes. 2020. The end of breast cancer. This is serious. This is real. Are you with us?

Read the White Paper by clicking here.

Myths about breast cancer: Self exams save lives.

Oh, how I wish this were true, but it simply isn’t. I practiced monthly breast self exams and didn’t even realize I had breast cancer, and advanced breast cancer at that. Furthermore, at my annual physical exam, my doctors’ fingers glided right over the tumor, to my other breast and got all concerned over a benign cyst there.

Yes, everybody was missing it. The mammograms had even missed it. You see, I had a lobular carcinoma, which isn’t a lump. Lobular breast cancer presents as a thickening of breast tissue, and in my case, was right behind the nipple. And it was large; 6+cm (more than two inches across) in size, and had already spread to my lymph nodes. I felt so guilty and stupid because I hadn’t found it in a BSE!

I can hear the anxious sucking in of breath out there as you read this.

Wait! Remember, I’m still sitting here, seven years later, writing this.

My point is two fold.

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