Image: Drawn by Lian

I posted a blog in November that I called “The Awareness-Industrial Complex,” spurred in large part by my blistering rage against a world which lets us drown in cancer-support products, but not actual cancer cures.

Sure, the pink crap hawked by the Susan G. Komen Foundation at a Walk/Run/Crawl/Kvetch For the Cure™ makes people feel good, but here’s a newflash: maybe cancer shouldn’t make people feel good.  Cancer, to those whose lives are touched by it (like me), feels very, very bad.  Cancer, to those whose bodies are actually enduring it, feels more terrifying than anything imaginable.

What would a world in which cancer made people ANGRY look like?  For one thing, there would be none of this NFL players in pink shoes bullshit.

Don’t get me wrong–Tom looks cute in these shoes, but what he wears doesn’t do a damn thing for a suffering patient.  Not the way that a research program at Johns Hopkins would.

Honestly, the Komen vs. Planned Parenthood kerfuffle makes me happy.  I’m disappointed that PP is losing over half a million dollars of Komen grant money, of course, but I’m pleased that PP supporters have kicked in nearly $400,000 since Komen’s boner became public (pro-choicers are the nicest people).  Most importantly, however, the public is starting to question the motives of a foundation that has very deep ties to Republican lawmakers who oppose not only women’s health initiatives, but also the environmental regulation that could ….wait for it…. prevent cancer.  Worst of all, it has long been known that Komen’s founder, Nancy Brinker, is a great friend of pharmaceutical companies that depend upon cancer to make money.

Watching the Komen brand suffer is schadenfreude at its finest–but any amount of suffering they endure is a trip to Disneyland compared to the pain of a cancer patient, of her children, and of her family.

FFI:

Behind the Pink Curtain: Komen’s Political Agenda (DailyKos)

The Marketing of Breast Cancer (AlterNet)

Think Before You Pink  (a project of Breast Cancer Action)

I hate cancer.  I hate it so, so much.  I hate it to the depths of my soul and back again.  I have never been diagnosed with cancer, but it’s taken plenty away from me all the same–the hole in me isn’t from a surgeon’s knife or a radiation beam, but from what my dear friend Liz took with her when she died of colon cancer in 2007.

Cancer is everywhere.  Members of my family have it, friends have it, neighbors have it.  Just before Thanksgiving, I learned that YET ANOTHER person I care about is under attack from the demon cancer.  I HATE IT.

You know what else I hate?  These:

A few months ago, a feminist lawyer of my acquaintance contacted me in my role as Minnesota NOW president to let me know about a suit being brought by a local girl against officials at her middle school, who disciplined her for wearing one of these godawful things.  This was a feminist/free speech/women’s health issue, she suggested.

Bullshit, I said.

As the mother of a middle schooler, I have been familiar with this bracelets for some time. Perhaps the best way to explain my position on the matter is to dramatize what occurred when Elliott expressed interest in getting one for himself.

MOM: No way are you getting one of those.  They’re sexist.
ELLIOTT: But Mom, they’re for cancer.
MOM: Oh yeah?  Did you know that men get a very serious form of cancer themselves? It’s called testicular cancer.
ELLIOTT: Uhh…
MOM: Are there kids at your school wearing bracelets that say “I heart nutsacks”?
ELLIOTT: (giggling uncontrollably)
MOM: I didn’t think so.  These bracelets aren’t about cancer, they’re about making fun of women’s bodies with cancer as a cover.  Until men’s bodies get in on the joke, no bracelets for you.

I planned to write a post about this lawyer’s request back when she made it, back in the thick of the  ”is it or isn’t it feminist” debate swirling around SlutWalk.  This lawyer, as it happened, hinted that SlutWalk might not have been her feminist cup of tea.  I invited her to share the issue with a future meeting of Minnesota NOW officers, state board delegates, and members, all of whom could debate the issue more intelligently than me, a person who attempts to fill the Liz-shaped hole inside of her with WHITE HOT RAGE directed at ANY AND ALL CANCER “AWARENESS” CAMPAIGNS.

Really.

Because that’s where we’ve arrived in the cancer “awareness” movement.  We are aware of cancer every day.  We run in races, we walk for three days, we wear rubber things on our wrists.  We are granted freedom to make as many boob, ta-ta, knockers, bazooms, and/or tit jokes that we want to.  We paint everything pink for “awareness,” yet the dollars are not reaching the scientists in the labs who need them.  More and more of the money is kept by the pinked-out corporations and enormous foundations who exist to make you feel good, not do good.  Think about it: ever since the Empire State Building started glowing pink during the month of October, have breast cancer rates gone down?  NO. In the most egregious example of pinkwashing yet, Susan G. Komen For the Cure actually commissioned an “awareness” perfume that contained toluene, a neurotoxicant, and galaxolide, a hormone disruptor.

You read right: CANCER AWARENESS IS GIVING US CANCER.

That’s a feminist issue.

Not long ago, Matt commented on something he’d read in the newspaper: “It says here that heart disease is the leading cause of death in this country,” he said. “If that’s true, then why do we know so many people with cancer?”

Good question. I wondered if it was because of our demographics–as thirtysomethings, we tend to hang with folks whose cholesterol profiles have not yet caught up with them. We eat cheese and drink beer with abandon. “That still doesn’t explain all the cancer,” he grumped.

This weekend Matt is on the east coast visiting a good friend and cancer survivor. It is a trip I made several times myself, before my own east coast friend succumbed to the disease in late 2007. This week alone we experienced both of cancer’s schizophrenic extremes: a diagnosed family member received wonderful PET scan results, while an old friend from high school had a five hour operation to remove a tumor from her brain.

I’m at a breaking point. I AM QUITE LITERALLY SICK TO FUCKING DEATH OF ALL THIS CANCER. It doesn’t help that the national nightmare that is health care reform in this country has brought end-of-life care and medical rationing into the debate.

I keep having flashbacks to the one time I accompanied Liz on her chemo day, at the Dana Farber Cancer Institute in Boston. One tiny positive through her whole ordeal was the fact that her insurance picked up the tab for all of her treatments. Avastin alone, she gasped, would cost over a hundred grand to someone who didn’t have insurance. Liz had Avastin, and a seemingly endless string of chemo drugs in addition to radiation, several surgeries, and many long hospital stays.

Liz was 33 and a half years old at the time of her diagnosis. She died two years later. How much did those two years cost her insurers? I don’t know. What would it cost not to pay for them?

Take a guess. It’s been nearly two years since she died and I can’t type this without feeling the too-familiar panicky clutch in my chest, the stinging tears welling up in my eyes. I would do anything, anything, to have her back again.

I think about her a lot. At times I smile when I think of the venom she would spew at those who believe that a single-payer system would limit access to the treatments that kept her alive–she knew that these treatments were out of most people’s reach already! Liz knew that our health care system was a moral disgrace. She had no doubt that thousands of other people with colon cancer would love to sit in her chemo chair at Dana Farber, but couldn’t. She knew those people would die more quickly, less hopefully, and certainly a hell of a lot poorer than she would.

Of course, she never planned on dying at all. I last spoke to her on October 29, 2007, when she called from her hospital bed to wish me a happy 36th birthday. She sounded frail, both physically and mentally. I was too afraid to ask about this strange thing called “end-of life care”, and she never mentioned it. All I could tell her was that I loved her, and that would have to be enough. She died two weeks later.

What DON’T we talk about when we talk about health care? Death. Money. Economic class. Equality, or the lack thereof. Fear. Mortality. Losing the illusion of control that we all hold so dear.

I can’t think about “health care reform” and not think about all the fucking cancer. I can’t hear “end of life” and think that death is going to happen to someone else. Death is coming, and death is real. Death is in the future for you, for me, for my children, for President Obama, for Rush Limbaugh, for everyone who panics at the idea of a single payer system. Death is a certainty. No one can escape it. The existence of death ought to humble us and make us more respectful of life. After all, if a dying woman can muster the strength to give a shit about the uninsured, why can’t everyone else?