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.
4 Comments:
You don't understand why breast cancer awareness is important? One word:
BOOBIES!!!
(for the record: I have had two female friends die and three other female friends are in remission... oh yeah, and I like boobies.)
Between your comment and Betty's "Christmas with a Dalek" song, I really ought to know better than to check my blog at work, even if I am on my lunch break.
Ahem, even so, I offer the following rebuttal, to the tune of Monty Python's "I Like Chinese".
I like boobies.
I like boobies.
When old, they hang down to her knees,
But when young, they're perky and a pleasure to squeeze.
Not to harsh on your bitterness (or to distract from the boobies :)), but I believe the reason why breast cancer in particular gets this kind of treatment is because it's detectable if you're looking for it, and it's very, very treatable if it's caught early, The more aware people are of it, of the symptoms and of the need to be watchful for it, the more likely they are to survive it if it happens to them. Sadly, as you and I both know, that's not true of all types of cancers. No simple self-exam would have saved my stepfather from the kidney cancer that killed him.
Of course, all the awareness in the world still doesn't do a heck of a lot of good for those of us who have naturally lumpy breasts to begin with, but we're well into the realm of TMI there, I think. :)
Nope, sorry. The best I can come up with is the germ of an idea tying together breasts and milk and cottage cheese (a lumpy dairy product), but I haven't gotten it to the curds and whey stage yet. It's still fluid. Anyone else want to milk this pun for something?
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