In the Pink

It appears to be a busy week for us, leading up to breast cancer awareness month. Yesterday, our athletics crew painted pink ribbons on the football field, and I helped put a 3-D one up in front of our athletics complex. (For my contribution, I received a rubbery-plasticy wristband which I am guilted into wearing the rest of this week - at least while at work.) Worse yet, at this Saturday's football game, the end zones will be painted pink, the band will be wearing pink baseball caps, and the team themselves will be wearing pink socks. The theme is "NMSU Aggies are tough enough to wear pink." (Where do you even find pink football socks?)

Call me spiteful or mean, but I don't particularly care. I realize that half of the human population is at risk of breast cancer merely because of gender (and a tiny percentage of males, too), but why should breast cancer be any more important to me than the recurrence of colon cancer that killed my grandmother or the pancreatic cancer that killed my father? Indeed, why should it be more important than any other disease, to have a whole month dedicated to it? (I'd be interested in seeing a "What Fatal Disease Are You?" online quiz, actually.)

Meanwhile, my skin is pink from sunburn. What color ribbon should I wear in the future when the dermatologist tells me I have skin cancer? I'll tell him/her that one of the contributing exposures was standing outside, in a high elevation desert, from noon until one p.m., helping to assemble an awareness reminder for a different cancer, an event which I wasn't warned about, so I didn't have any sunblock prepared.