Ribbons

There are ribbons for everything now, right? Red for HIV. Or for HIV awareness, or research, or living with HIV. White is confusing, especially when there is a purple ribbon in the mix. And pink is for breast cancer, or for breast cancer survivors. I realized last night after I made the mistake of typing "breast cancer" and "support" into a google search that I'm not sure who gets the ribbon. Certainly a very large number of the sites were for survivors, fewer for "women who have survived or are currently undergoing treatment for breast cancer", and none that I got to which were exclusively about or for people right in the thick of it - which, I realize now that I think about it, may have as much to do with those folks being too sick and too tired to maintain any kind of dynamic web presence. Doesn't it seem like the nice thing to do would be for the survivors to maintain a site for people who are surviving but maybe not done enough to be survivors?

The country loves a survivor, more than they love an underdog in fact. Underdogs who don't bust out are just losers. Survivors are something much better. Survivor means you lived through it and then you came back. The coming back is crucial. What you come back to is of course defined, perhaps implicitly even to themselves, by the people who are making the judgment.

What? That's not fair you say? Yeah, I suppose it's not.

Do you get a pink ribbon if you survive your cancer but you're pissed off? Do you get a pink ribbon if you survive but you don't make a huge comeback, you don't get all the way back up on whatever horse it is the world thinks you should be on. Do you get a pink ribbon if your breast cancer goes into remission and you decide your husband's idea of "support", which included grudgingly washing about one sinkful of dishes per week and saying things like "hey sweetie, I sure hope you get better soon 'cause I miss your turkey pot pie" is as worthless as he is and divorce the bastard only to end up making less money and needing your friends' and family's support again? Do you get a pink ribbon if you don't come out BETTER than you went in?

I wonder about these things.


Yesterday, Molly Ivins died, my sister had a biopsy of a lump in her breast (which was not the lump my sister found on her self exam but a lump the doctor found after dismissing the one my sister found), and I was told a good friend of mine has breast cancer.

My sister's test was negative. No pathology, but apparently based on the mechanics of the thing they've declared her boob nontumored. I truly and deeply believe if they had stuck a needle in a man's nuts (or even just the one nut) that what was removed would have been sealed up and shipped off for cytological testing, a background check, and held on $100,000 bail until a judge and jury of the most overpaid experts could determine it was totally not dangerous. Since there were no nuts involved and just titties, the people doing the biopsy were able to discern all was normal and good just by looking at the fluid and at the way the mass collapsed post, er, specimen collection.

Thank god the diagnostic protocols for breast cancer spare the patient's insurance company the difficulty and discomfort of a not terribly expensive glance at some boob fluid under a microscope.

My friend did not have normal good results. She is very independent and prizes her solitude. I called her after hearing from my (our) advisor (C____) and I got her voicemail. Because she is even more direct a communicator than I am, I figured no point in pussyfooting. My message went something like "Hey....I talked to C___ today and I heard you have breast cancer."

Because what the fuck else are you gonna say? I tried to wait to call her until I could say the words without feeling my throat close up. I know, treatment's better these days, earlier detection means a better prognosis. I know that. I also know that she's very independent and has a very hard time asking for or accepting certain kinds of help.

I've spent the day since I heard about this alternately mad (for not much identifiable reason) and sad. A very large amount of my reaction, I am embarassed to say, is quite selfish. I want to be strong enough to say (and mean) "I will do whatever you need me to, whenever it is needed" to her. And I couldn't.

Hence my internet search.

I do not want to commit what I personally believe is one of the cardinal sins of offering or giving token help. Also, I don't want to end up trying to give more help than I am physically able and getting fucked for that (yeah, it could happen, like the time I went up to boston to help my brother out and ended up too sick to drive home...this particular friend in fact was the person who came to my rescue that time). Since these days I'm about 1/3-1/2 of what I used to be in terms of sheer physical usefulness even to myself, I was trying to think of what possible ways I might be useful for my friend. What can I offer her that is useful, needed, and that I will be able to do?

So I hit the internet looking for some seriously practical info on what folks "in the thick of it" find helpful in terms of support because while I can try to imagine what I might find helpful (and then try to decide what I can even do of that set of things), that speculation would be based on my subjective experience and my subjective experience does not include being diagosed with or treated for breast cancer, so it's insufficient.

Let me tell you, there's a lot of not terribly practical information out there. Even here, which seemed to fit the bill and where they at least mentioned "practical assistance" along with "emotional support", I found more generality and vague references to support as a sort of concept and state of being than I found actual useful information. How about an article like "'A list of best ways people helped out during my chemo', by someone who has/had breast cancer"?