Glad to see you’re doing well. Next time don’t disappear for so long . . .you scared us! :)

Bonnie (from the board/Boston/louisville :)

All that to say… I feel you. I do.

Before I was diagnosed with cancer last summer… I thought all of the pink ribbons was pure overkill and a bad example of how something good can quickly be distorted. And then last October, I had to go through chemotherapy while looking at pink ribbons every where I turned. It angered me deeply and made me cry almost every moment of every day. Its hard enough to have a devastating illness but to be consistently and constantly reminded that its there and there’s no cure and you’re just going to have to suffer — assuming you don’t die of it — can be too much.

I read your post thinking it would anger me, but it didn’t. I can understand why you feel the way you do. But I wonder if any one can understand why I feel the way I do. How do I say this? Every where I turn, there is a pink ribbon. On a car. On a bracelet. On a t-shirt. On a cup… at a bakery. Just everywhere. There is NO ESCAPE.

Right now, I’m transitioning back to “normal” life — whatever that is. My treatments are almost done so its time to return to work. The pink ribbon movement has sort of imprisoned me in a particular place. I can either embrace it, or spend extraordinary energy trying to ignore it. I’m actually choosing the former. But honestly… it feels like a burden. I am now the poster child for breast cancer for everyone who knows me. I represent what they fear most for themselves or their loved ones. The pink ribbons don’t give me strength or even hope right now — just another label I get to wear for someone else’s benefit.

So… while you may feel like the wallflower at the dance. I feel like the girl forced to be in the spotlight. Neither seems like a really comfortable place to be.

Anyway’s, I had ordered a shirt for a dear friend of mine who has stage iv lung cancer and i had not heard anything back or received it, so thought I would send you a quick email to let you know I had done so. Paypal did go through though.

You can email me back whenever you get a chance!

Glad to hear you are doing great!!!!

Lisa

I was just as glad to see the end of all that as I was to see the end of Presidential campaging in the US on Nov 4th!!

I’m entirely glad that I’m not the only one that has that funky feeling inside as I walk past the shelves and shelves of endless pink everywhere.

I try to be normal, I try to be polite (sometimes) but it’s f’ing tough. I’m coming up on treament #6 of 12 and already have been back to work for over a month.

A great example of both these happened about 3′ish weeks ago:

I know I don’t feel good, but I’m tired sitting at home, but I’ve got the grumpy-chemo-face (at least inside) and can smell it everywhere. Then I ran into a group of Boobifiles who were actively recruiting donations and that was the ‘straw’.

It might have been different if I didn’t encounter the only militant group of BC supporters (and if it wasn’t the Sat after my Wed chemo) but I simply explained to them that that I already committed $120,000 of my health insurance companies money to the cause as a whole.

Thanks for listening.

Loretta