Breast Cancer Awareness Game: HOAX!

I recently saw, from someone who has been a Facebook/actual friend for a very long time, a sudden, dramatic announcement on her status update: WE'RE MOVING TO VERMONT AT THE END OF THE YEAR! This was followed by a ton of comments from her friends: "Oh no!" "Why didn't you tell me?" "I thought you said you'd never leave (your hometown)!", etc. etc.

Then I got a message from her that made no sense at all:

Bahahahaha~~ You shouldn't have liked or commented on my last status! Now you have to pick from one of the below and post it as your status. This is the 2016 Breast Cancer Awareness game. Don't be a spoil sport. Pick your poison from one of these and post it as your status.

1. Just found a squirrel in my car!
2. Just used my kids to get out of a speeding ticket.
3. How do you get rid of foot fungus?
4. All of my bras are missing!
5. I think I just accepted a marriage proposal online?!
6. I've decided to stop wearing underwear.
7. It's confirmed I'm going to be a mommy/daddy.
8. Just won a chance audition on America's got talent!
9. I've been accepted on master chef.
10. I'm getting a pet monkey!
11. I just peed myself!
12. Really thinking about getting butt implants!
13. Just won 700 on a scratcher!
14. We're moving to Vermont at the end of the year!
15. Mayonnaise on Reese's peanut butter cups is sooo good! 

Post with no explanations. Sorry, I fell for it too. Looking forward to your post. Ahhh don't ruin it. (Don't let the secret out). And remember it's all for the 2016 Breast Cancer Awareness." Go Pink!!

This was an invitation to play a kind of Facebook tag, the kind I never participate in anyway. I'm offended by all these kinds of things, but this one. . . The fact that it was somehow (?) connected to breast cancer awareness particularly offended me. It felt as if something incredibly serious was being trivialized. I was given no choice but to be a good sport and go along with it, when it wasn't funny or constructive at all. When I checked this on Snopes, it turned out this sort of thing has been going on for years and years, with variations in the nature of the status posts. The worst of them involved women claiming to be pregnant ("Surprise!"). Not surprisingly, none of this has anything whatsoever to do with breast cancer funding or research, or even (as far as I am concerned) "awareness".

There is a sense that if people are aware of something, it's always a good thing that can only lead to MORE good things. Oh yes? The Kardashians? Donald Trump? Awareness on its own means nothing, and can lead to the kind of endless, pointless blather that is currently choking the internet.

I messaged my friend back and pointed out that this was a hoax, which she denied: she said she had researched it (in other words, she was right about it and I was wrong). Furthermore, she had a friend with breast cancer who loved it, supposedly making it not only OK but (?) desirable and effective, though no donation button existed anywhere. Then she prescribed (presumably, for my bitterness and anger in NOT playing the game)  a favorite self-help book of hers called Loving What Is.  Self-help/acceptance for someone who obviously needed it. The message seemed to be: if I didn't go along with her cancer boondoggle, I must have something wrong with my emotional health.

I cannot really describe the welter of feelings I have right now. I feel condescended to, and jerked around. It just isn't funny, but if I don't play along with it I am a "spoilsport" and don't care about all those suffering women. I wonder if any of her other (baffled?) Facebook friends are having the same reaction, but it may well be the usual Greek chorus thing: "ohhhhh, you fooled me there!" "Oh, I'm so glad you're not moving to Vermont."

The following is an excerpt from a powerful 2013 blog post by cancer warrior Lisa Bonchek Adams.
http://lisabadams.com/2013/10/04/breast-cancer-still-facebook-game/

I will not say she "lost her battle" in 2015, as everyone seems to phrase it. Rather, she lived with her disease as fully and openly as is humanly possible, and wrote magnificently while doing so. I quote her here because nobody has ever said it with more eloquence:

"Once again Facebook games about breast cancer are making the rounds now that it is October. I posted this last year and got some flack from people who thought anything that 'raised awareness' about breast cancer was good and couldn’t understand why I am critical of these messages.

My point is that this isn’t awareness.

There probably isn’t anyone on Facebook who doesn’t know that breast cancer exists. But there certainly is a lot of myth-busting to be done. This is not how to do it. . . There’s a lot of work to be done educating. Education is awareness, these Facebook posts are not.

(There follows a version of the above list of options)

The above instructions are not awareness. This is offensive. Breast cancer is not a joke, awareness does not come from sharing the color of your underwear or your marital status (the whole “tee-hee, wink-wink” attitude adds to my disgust). Even if it ended up on TV, that still would not be educating people about breast cancer they didn’t know before. All it does is show the world that lots of people are willing to post silly things as their status updates.

Just because it says it’s about breast cancer awareness doesn’t mean you have to agree. Go ahead. Ignore it. Or write back and tell them why you don’t want to be included in these things anymore. Another blogger, Susan Niebur, wrote about her take here. She was an astrophysicist, by the way. She died of metastatic breast cancer.

Anyone who has breast cancer and uses your FB status update as an indicator of whether you support their cause is not very enlightened. When I rank 'how to help those of us with cancer,' sharing one of these paragraphs as a status update is the lowest possible method of showing support. There are endless ways to do that. I think it actually is the opposite; sharing these status updates makes people feel they are doing something real for breast cancer causes when they aren’t. (emphasis mine)

I say: count me out of these Facebook games.

I have stage 4 breast cancer and it is no game to me."

LOL, YOU SHOULD NOT HAVE LIKED OR COMMENTED!!!! NOW YOU HAVE TO PICK ONE FROM THESE BELOW AND POST IT TO YOUR STATUS. THIS IS THE 2014 BREAST CANCER AWARENESS GAME. DON’T BE A SPOILSPORT, PICK YOUR POISON FROM ONE OF THESE AND CHANGE YOUR STATUS, 1) DAMN DIARRHOEA 2) JUST USED MY BOOBS TO GET OUT OF A SPEEDING TICKET 3) ANYONE HAVE A TAMPON, I’M OUT 4) HOW DO YOU GET RID OF FOOT FUNGUS? 5) WHY IS NOBODY AROUND WHEN I’M HORNY? 6) NO TOILET PAPER, GOODBYE SOCKS. 7) SOMEONE HAS OFFERED ME A JOB AS A PROSTITUTE BUT I’M HESITANT. 8) I THINK I’M IN LOVE WITH SOMEONE, WHAT SHOULD I DO? 9) I’VE DECIDED TO STOP WEARING UNDERWEAR. 10) IT’S CONFIRMED, I’M GOING TO BE A MUMMY/DADDY! 11) JUST WON £900 ON A SCRATCH CARD 12) I’VE JUST FOUND OUT I’VE BEEN CHEATED ON FOR THE LAST 5 MONTHS. POST WITH NO EXPLANATIONS. SO SORRY I FELL FOR IT TOO!!!!! LOOKING FORWARD TO YOUR POST HA HA.

I realize I take the risk of my friend seeing this and being offended. But if we are real friends, there will be a conversation about it, not just "here, read this self-help book, you obviously need it". I have no idea if she will get anything but positive feedback from her other friends on her baffling, confusing post, and I suppose it's none of my business.

People have pointed out that the "ice-bucket challenge" of a few years ago was gimmicky, too - but I seem to remember it was tied to actual donations of money. I am not "against" all awareness projects, nor am I "against" cancer research. I am not grim and humourless, nor do I believe that breast cancer can never be approached in a light-hearted way.

But there is a difference between light-hearted and goddamn stupid.

Social media, so promising at the beginning, has become a cheap and silly game, and I often wonder why I stay with it. I only opened a Facebook account because I had a book coming out and my publisher required me to do so. Especially during the American election, I've seen comments that made my hair stand on end from people I thought I knew.

It saddens me to say I had to unfollow my friend, and I may have to do more than that because my insides feel like a milkshake. Social media would say, "Don't feel that way" or "ignore it", the good old turn-off-your-feelings advice that has the world on the brink of total meltdown. Or, I guess, embrace acceptance as a way of life and never be angry again.

It's hard to unfriend someone I've known for 30 years. But I don't want to feel this way because of something she sent me. It's my life, and I can feel what I want to - and I will.

Visit Margaret's Amazon Author Page!

It must have been owls

This was an odd day, an odd week, and sometimes considerably worse than odd. You see, after my last routine mammogram, I got the dreaded "call back". They wanted to take a more detailed mammogram, along with an ultrasound. Fine, I thought, except these retakes generally meant that they "found something", and that couldn't be good. So I went through it all again, they squeezed and kneaded and poked and pressed, I got all covered with KY Jelly or whatever-it-is they use to lubricate your skin while they look underneath it.

They concentrated on my left breast, where they seemed to think the "problem" was. By the time they got done, I knew how a waffle must feel while it is being baked. Or at least, my left breast did. I could practically see the grid-marks.

A few days went by. I was prepared to let it go, assuming everything was fine, when I got another call back. I was supposed to see my doc so she could "go over" the results of the second mammogram.

Go over.

Go over? What was this about? I was expecting either nothing (the usual response to a normal test), or a call saying "your test is negative," or something like that. But this.

So I tried to keep my head out of it all week, and I was more-or-less fine until last night, when for the first time in a while I couldn't sleep. It was as if an icicle were slowly turning in the centre of my abdomen. All night.

Sometimes I think I want to lay it down, just give up, because, after all, I have achieved very few of my dreams, in spite of what often seems like mammoth (futile) effort. Then when something like this comes up, when I feel the hot breath of mortality blasting down my neck, I hear some voice in my head, some idiot but triumphant, desperate, ridiculously valiant and probably absurd voice shouting out loud:

"I want to live!"

It was like a pendulum, see, between the nice, logical "Ah, nothing's the matter, it never is, statistics are all in your favour, callbacks are common," etc. etc. (no family history, everyone lives to be over 90, etc.) and a violent swing in the other direction, a silent totting up of all the victims, people I had known, loved, or even just heard about, who had either survived breast cancer after a long and horrendous ordeal, or hadn't survived at all. I began to wonder if the "thing" that rides around with me, beside me I mean, always clamped to my peripheral vision, would suddenly rear up in front of me and make it impossible to take another step.

In the doctor's little room today, you know, the little room they tell you about on Seinfeld, while waiting for the doctor, I had to do deep breathing, deep slow breathing to try to relax the knot of primal terror in my belly. The doctor comes in. How are you? Fine. Oh God. The doctor sits down at the computer. So what are we doing today? MY GOD SHE DOESN'T KNOW?? No, she has been away from the office for a week and has no idea why I have come in today. This means that no one sitting in this room has any idea what it says on my report.

So she blinks and flips and scrolls and "hmmmmms", like she always does, and asks me the usual incredulous questions. So what happened when they examined you? What did they say? It says here they saw a bruise. Did they see a bruise? Yes, I had some sort of little bruise - I don't know where it came from - Oh, I see. It must have been in the spot, see here - look - where they thought you might have a cyst. Well, yes, it was. They put a sticker on it. A what? A sticker, so the ultrasound person could - Oh.

You had a bruise, Margaret, a small one that mimicked some little probably-harmless cyst, though in six months you will have to go through all the testing again in case. In case what?

It's late at night, and I sit here tired, having dodged a certain bullet, or gotten out of Dodge, or whatever it is. Strangely, a few minutes ago I heard a ghostly trilling, as if boys were hooting at each other over long distances, but after a while I realized it must have been owls. They were as resonant and loud as if they were right outside my window, and with all that thick bush out there, just a stone's throw away, perhaps they were. They might have been right in my own back yard.

Post-script. Yes, it was owls! The Cornell Laboratory of Ornithology site has helped me identify many a species through sound alone. In this case, the calls of  various common owls allowed me to compare, and quickly make a match. Looks like these were barred owls, and they were very close to the house, maybe even in the back yard. We have huge rich cedars out there, so it makes sense. One row of houses in back of us, and we're in dense bush. But if these were birds, I could not believe the volume! These things fairly boomed. The sound moved around in a bizarre way, too. I kept thinking, that has to be kids making ape noises, but the sounds simply weren't human. These birds make a hell of a racket! They have a lot of different calls too, some of them sort of trilling (chilling). Since their territory is the Pacific Northwest, I think we're close enough (though they resemble the rare spotted owl in plumage - but not in voice). I couldn't see anything out there, but I'll be vigilant from now on, that is, until colder weather necessitates keeping my office window shut. This page has a rich variety of sample calls. Listen to these guys, you'll be totally spooked out!

http://www.allaboutbirds.org/guide/Barred_Owl/sounds

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Id2A8yC_JJY

Ovarian cancer: teal should be the only color (and other musings on social atrocity)

This is one of those days when a lot is happening: we lost Pete Seeger at the great-grandfatherly age of 94. Without Seeger there couldn't have been a Dylan, and without Dylan there couldn't have been a Springsteen, and on and on.

When this great tree fell, the tree that will gradually compost itself into soil for succeeding generations (that is, if we don't strip it bare and pave it over instead), there was no terrible grief, because he had given more even in the first 40 years of his life than most people do in a lifetime. He was a light, a real man, both gentle and fierce. I once saw a clip of him playing Beethoven's Ode to Joy on a banjo. It seemed to sum him up, somehow.

But at the same time, other rumblings are felt. As if it's an entirely new phenomenon, as if it's a disease that women are still ashamed of and expected to bear alone, ovarian cancer is just barely beginning to come out of the closet. I've written about this before, about how "pink isn't the only color", though by the relentless pompom-waving juggernaut that is the breast cancer industry, you'd never know it.

Today Facebook was full of it, warning women not to use baby powder on themselves or they'd get ovarian cancer, without explaining just how. Like wildfire, the warning was shared and shared, kind of like the one about apple cider vinegar curing heart disease. These things remind me of the forest animals in Bambi during the fire: "Run! Run!" Why is it everyone automatically drops 30 or 40 IQ points, or else reverts to ten years old, when they go on Facebook?

But I digress. Ovarian cancer isn't cool because it isn't nearly as survivable as that other, more stylish disease. It's just not in vogue, and besides, it's terrifying. Women dread it infinitely more, knowing they won't just lose a breast or their hair, but their lives. They don't talk about it, it's still hushed, silenced, and profoundly stigmatized. It's as if you've done something irreversibly wrong to your most female, womanly parts, and they have turned irretrievably toxic. 

The ovarian cancer awareness movement had to pick teal as its color, maybe because all the others were taken. But in some ways, it's oddly appropriate. Teal isn't just one color, but is a mix of green and blue, the blue darker than in turquoise. It's a tiny bit exotic, a little outside the orbit. The disease isn't in the public consciousness yet, not in the way that the "other one" is. My feeling is that it's disgraceful to pound away at one form of cancer at the expense of others. In the rainbow of known diseases, in the spectrum of things we talk about and make banners about and run for and scream and cheer for, ovarian cancer isn't even in the running.  But teal is a new color, an original, slightly rebellious. I like it. I like surviving, and I like fairness, and I LOVE unfairly neglected causes getting their due at long last.

The thing I saw on Facebook today about talcum powder migrating up your vagina and poisoning your ovaries with cancer seemed absurd at first, but I've come to believe that it doesn't matter whether it makes sense or not. The warning has put the disease on the table for discussion. Let's keep it there for a while, shall we, until people stop gasping in horror and turning away.

Oh, and speaking of which, this is Mental Health Day, isn't it? I'm not sure what they call it now. (My brother, a schizophrenic, once made the memorable statement, "Support mental health or I'll kill you.") Anyway, it's the one day out of the year when we're allowed to think/talk about mental illness. Just the way it's approached bugs me - a sort of awkward "uhh, let's go in the other room and actually talk about this - now don't be ashamed, don't feel stigmatized, we're not stigmatizing you, in fact by talking about it, by starting a dialogue, we're hoping to break down the stigma that makes everyone think you're a raving maniac." 

It's sort of like that. It's still that bad smell that maybe can be dispelled using the same formula that worked for breast cancer (except it will never work, due to humanity's millenia-long dread and horror of mental illness). 
People in the news, stars like Catherine Zeta Jones, "admit" to having bipolar disorder, or even "confess" to having it, as you'd confess to a serious crime. These awkward public admissions are laden with guilt and culpability, but who notices? She's "brave" to unmask herself, to strip bare this jolting revelation: brave, that universal description for saying something it really would have been better to keep to yourself. 

When will this change? I think, when the last human being takes its last poisonous, gas-laden, toxic gasp of air before expiring. Maybe in twenty years or so. Nice to see the stigma dispelled that quickly.

OK, then - this piece has no theme to it at all except "things that bug me", so I might as well go steaming ahead. Facebook, my new Bible (blughhh) is now running all sorts of pieces on Woody Allen and "the scandal" (you know, the one he calls "What Scandal?"), in which he apparently abducted his own stepdaughter and married her, molesting his 7-year-old other stepdaughter in the process.

The family, incredibly, is still bitter and angry, even hysterical about this. Ronan Farrow, Mia's oldest son, sent Woody a Father's Day card that read, "Happy Father's Day - or, in your case, Happy Brother-in-law's Day." Never mind, he was actually sired by Frank Sinatra anyway, and he's dead, so we can't go into Mafia ramifications. Myself, I am surprised at the rancor and even hate that Mia still feels for Woody. I'm not saying all should be comfy-cozy with him: he strikes me as fairly reptilian and a man who will pretty much take whatever he feels like, claiming, "The heart wants what it wants." But Mia strikes me as earth-motherish, having adopted a dozen or so disabled Third World children, a granola type who normally would preach forgiveness for everyone because, after all, "everything happens for a reason" and our enemies teach us the most valuable lessons in life. We shouldn't hate them, but thank them.

Mia is still a screaming banshee when it comes to all this stuff. I don't know what really happened in the Farrow/Allen household 20 years ago, but I do know that, against the odds, Woody and Soon-Yi Farrow are still married and have raised two daughters together. I doubt if Woody is the kind of Dad who goes to their ballet recitals, but he hasn't walked out on them either. 

That said, I still have problems with Allen. He made a searingly brilliant film last year called Blue Jasmine, with Cate Blanchett out-Blanching Blanche du Bois in a performance that made my scalp crackle. The only false note in it, and it was a real clanger that nobody even noticed or maybe didn't dare comment on, was the utter disconnect from any kind of technology beyond 1950. In order to get a decent job, Jasmine had to take "a computer course", something so generic it sounded like the courses my local library offered seniors in 1992. The classroom depicted a lot of twentyish students sitting at rectangular desks with antique-looking monitors in front of them. Jasmine supposedly didn't know anything about this - at all - though in another scene, she uses an iphone with impugnity. I don't think Allen knows what iphones are - he has no idea what Twitter is, and is only vaguely aware of blogging or YouTube. Somebody must have forced this change on him just to anchor the film in the present day. (Or maybe he thought she was improvising a mad scene by talking into her makeup case.)

What do you call this ranty rambling, then? Pete Seeger will turn to soil, or maybe not if he turns into pavement. Ovarian cancer as a "cause" will remain buried unless and until people care enough to bring it out of the closet. Mental health issues are still "admitted", "confessed", always "bravely", of course. The bravery isn't in enduring what can be an excruciating illness (but hey, not always! One can live with it in a state of grace and even joy!), but in having the guts to admit you've had something you should have been able to snap yourself out of yourself. Something that inspires primal shivers of dread and even repugnance, because it is associated with the walking dead. The jabbering homeless. Vivien Leigh, Blanche du Bois, receiving shock treatments in a "psycho ward". (And here's a connection. The deranged Jasmine babbles away to a couple of kids sitting there trying to comprehend what she's saying. She talks about "Edison's Medicine" - ECT treatments, presumably, a phrase that used to mean execution by electricity, "the chair".)

And on it goes.

It's been my experience that if you criticize or even comment on anything, people will expect you to be able to fix it. So if I could do one thing to set the world right, what would it be? Slap humanity on the side of the head and tell it to SMARTEN UP before it's too late! Or at least wake up. Great potential riches lie asleep, buried because we are afraid of them. Afraid of looking at them, but most of all, of looking at ourselves.

POST-BLOG THOUGHTS. As usual, I have some post-thoughts in this post. The little doohickey above is interesting. "Strong men can have depression TOO" - what does that imply, or perhaps scream from the rooftops? "Strong men can have depression, JUST LIKE WEAK MEN" (or wusses, or crybabies, or homosexuals, or whoever you happen to hate on a particular day). It's just inherent in the statement that "we" think depression only happens to men who are NOT strong, at least not strong emotionally. So we have to reassure everyone that YES! Even guys with big bulging muscles, even guys who have more brains in their dicks than their heads, even Mafia dons and Wall Street wild animals and other perceived power types, CAN HAVE DEPRESSION, though we still cannot figure out why - it's a puzzle, a real riddle that anyone with any earthly power at all, any perceived social worth, would ever have it! Must just be a quirk of the human condition. Or all those steroids I've been sucking down for the past 10 years.

http://margaretgunnng.blogspot.ca/2013/04/the-glass-character-synopsis.html

http://members.shaw.ca/margaret_gunning/betterthanlife.htm

Total abstinence: I won't last a day without food

I can’t remember the last time I went a whole day without eating.

I used to go on extreme diets, but that was a long time ago. When I look at pictures of how thin I was BEFORE the diet, I plotz. In some photos I look like a ghost: it was at that point that I felt I was “thin enough”, at least until I put back 5 pounds or so.

I have had an uneasy relationship with food, with eating.  Whole industries have sprung up around it, billions of dollars’ worth. Buying food, preparing food, eating in restaurants so we won’t have to put out any effort at all.

I remember feeling a little shocked when a friend of mine (quite obese, and apparently going to a nutritionist because she said she had no interest in food ) said to me, after we’d finished eating in a restaurant, “So what's so great about it? It’s in one end and out the other.”

Well, it’s true, but we don’t think about that, do we?

Why make such a fuss about food? Everything turns to shit anyway. Kind of like a metaphor for life.

I’m thinking about all this, as I sit here already feeling hollow and groany in the stomach. I’ve been doing “prep” for a colonoscopy for several days now, first with a restricted diet (no this, no that), and today with a liquid diet restricted to anything I can see through.

Meaning limited Jell-o, limited chicken broth (these consumed as “meals”), ginger ale, apple juice, and water and water and water. And water.

Already I am feeling unmoored. For food isn’t just something that keeps us going, as in "calories in". It’s a way of marking the day, of orientation. “Haven’t you had lunch yet?” “You mean you don’t eat breakfast? It’s the most important meal of the day.” (Why?) “Let’s have dinner some time.” Etc. Not “let’s get together and talk trash", but “let’s get together and stuff food into our mouths”.

I won’t write about the obesity crisis which seems to be blowing people up like balloons. My theory (one that I have never seen anywhere else) is that people are responding to the emotional stress of a harrowing, violent, climate-damaged world by stuffing things in their mouths. They’ve been doing it since they were babies.

It’s self-comforting, and the thing is, when you walk into the average store, I mean a drug store or department store like Walmart or Target or one of those, one of the first things you see is a WALL of junk Sometimes walls and walls of it. None of it is really edible and most of it consists of sugar, fat and other empty calories. All of it is within easy reach and does not cost very much.

Ladies and gentlemen, here’s your pacifier! Come stuff it in your mouth, and a few hours later, shit it out in your diaper. Or wherever.

But I set out to write about this strange fast, this abstinence, fortunately only one-and-a-half days long. Later this day I must purge, and I’ve heard this stuff is a Roto-Rooter to your insides. It scares me half to death  because the whole reason I am having this procedure is that I’ve been having abdominal pains. Might they be made infinitely worse by this liquid Draino I have to drink tonight?

I am not one of these people who wants to “watch”, by the way. I don’t know why they let anyone watch the procedure. The whole reason it’s done is to screen for cancer, tumors and other abnormalities of the colon. Who wants to be lying there staring at the screen and suddenly hear the technician say, “Oh my God, that’s the worst one I’ve ever seen"?

It’s seven minutes after eleven, and all I’ve had today is coffee (black) and water (clear). I thank the Lord I can have coffee at least. When I have my fasting glucose test every few months, coffee is not allowed, and by the time my arm is stuck and bled, my head is pounding. After the siphoning I run for Starbuck’s or, even better, McDonald’s, which has surprisingly good coffee that is just loaded with caffeine.

As I sit here listening to my stomach make noises like a grizzly, my mind bounces back and forth. I’ve been doing this for weeks now, but it has intensified over the past few days. Of course everything will be all right. I’ve “passed” every medical test I have ever had. Nothing is ever wrong. EVER.

Then why am I having this?

There’s no cancer in my family. Anywhere. But that turned out to be a lie, or a “mis-truth”, a form of selective amnesia. My Dad was indeed treated for bladder cancer and completely cured and went on to live another 30 years. My mother had her uterus removed, but no one ever told me why (and in fact I did not find out she had a hysterectomy until many years later. At the time, she was just “in the hospital”.)

So it is quite possible that BOTH my parents had cancer. A strange sort of flip-flop from what I believed until quite recently. I wasn’t lying to myself. I just didn’t “know”, though in fact I knew very well. I was protecting myself from the truth.

So how do I feel without the anchoring effect of food, the three meals a day that prevents everything from blurring together into “blunch”, “linner” and “dupper”? I find I’m already forgetting and almost grabbing something to eat. Just a banana. (God, I had a lot of bananas yesterday.) I am holding off on my feast of peach Jell-o and Knorr chicken broth (“Made from real chicken!” Hell’s bells, what ELSE would it be made from?) until I am truly desperate.

I don’t want this “procedure” to happen, but at the same time I want it over with. I know the most likely result: no phone call, which is good news, isn’t it? Better than the other kind.

I can’t help but remember, though, all the friends I used to have, the ones who fell to disease: cancer, heart attack, AIDS, more cancer. . . Oddly enough, the one that bothered me most was the recent death of someone I could only call an acquaintance. I had not seen her for years – she was once a member of my former church and had just been ordained as a minister – and then suddenly I’m getting a Facebook message inviting me to her memorial service.

MEMORIAL SERVICE?

When you leave a place you’ve been part of for years, it sort of freezes in time. If you meet someone you knew years later, you can’t help but think, God, they look old. But when someone dies at 50. . .  Someone you admired, liked, even though you weren’t really friends. Someone whom you knew would make an outstanding minister because of her soaring spirit and vibrant faith.

And now she’s dead. Dead?

I am still having trouble getting my head around it, don’t really believe it, can’t associate her with death at all. And it was cancer, that looming shadow, perhaps the main thing we are trying to rule out tomorrow, which is why I have to be so cleaned out. If she could die like that, just vanish, so that I’ll never see her again. . .

I can’t finish that sentence.

This is just a procedure. Millions of people have it. I haven’t had any real symptoms. At least, I don’t think they are symptoms. I don’t know what they are, just things that have been bothering me. I only know I am not allowed to eat, and the peach Jell-o quivering in the fridge is beginning to look like coq au vin.

Not eating, fasting, is like missing a step in a dance or a skipping rhythm. Or maybe stepping back from everything. It feels weird, hollow. It leaves you clutching at the air. And oddly depressed, your pacifier snatched out of your mouth, so that you are forced to see, and feel, all the things that you would really rather not.

Breast cancer: don't worry your pretty little head!

The Canadian Task Force on Preventive Health Care says self-examination of the breasts is of little utility. Photo credit: ©2011 Thinkstock

Breast-screening guidelines fuel firestorm


New guidelines for breast cancer screening that recommend women avoid routine mammography until age 50 are based on faulty methodology and will result in an "untold number of lives lost" if implemented across Canada, the Canadian Association of Radiologists charges.

The guidelines, released Monday by the Canadian Task Force on Preventive Health Care, recommend against routine mammography screening for most women age 40 to 49, arguing the "harms and costs of false-positive results, overdiagnosis and overtreatment" outweigh any "significant reductions in the relative risk of death from breast cancer".

Aimed at settling more than a decade of contentious debate over the recommended frequency and value of breast cancer screening, the guidelines also say that clinical breast exams and self-exams have no benefit and should never be undertaken, and urge that women over 50 only have mammograms every two to three years, instead every one or two.

But critics say the data on which the guidelines are based is dated.

The recommendation against routine screening of women under the age of 50 who are at average risk of developing breast cancer risk is self-admittedly "weak," and based on "essentially antiquated" and "unbalanced" evidence, argues Dr. Nancy Wadden, chair of the Canadian Association of Radiologist’s Mammography Accreditation Program and medical director of the breast screening program for Newfoundland and Labrador. "The task force looked at studies that were over 25 years old [involving] equipment that is outdated and not even available anymore. There's been enormous changes in breast imaging since that time, [and] in addition radiologists' interpretation skills have improved tremendously."

Part of the problem is that randomized control trials have only been conducted on analog mammography, "because digital hasn't been around long enough," adds Dr. Christine Wilson, medical director of the Screening Mammography Program at the British Columbia Cancer Agency.

Wadden contends that more recent observational and community studies indicate that there are "definite benefits" to screening younger women using digital mammography.

This is the kind of news report that makes my blood boil, triggering a sickened, terrified feeling that bubbles up from deep within.


The powers-that-be have once more muddied the waters in the realm of women's health care and disease prevention. Oh, and it won't be the first time! I'm old enough to remember the time - and this went on for years and years - when medical studies "proved" that hormone replacement therapy protected women from heart disease. In many cases it was prescribed to middle-aged and older women for that reason alone.


People listened to this without questioning it, doctors adopted it as policy, and all went merrily along, with uncounted women dropping dead from heart attacks due to "unknown" factors. Maybe heredity? Inability to handle stress? If doctors even looked at the fact that these women had been on estrogen for ten or fifteen years, they simply did not see it, demonstrating the bizarre blindness all too common in what passes for women's health care.

Then someone bothered to do a study. But it had to be halted in a hurry, because the women taking the estrogen were dying of heart disease at an alarming rate.



Yes, that's right. Dying.


Can a task force be wrong? Can studies be flawed? You bet they can. Already charges have been levelled that the data in this ludicrous study came from dinosaur technology, analog equipment that is now obsolete. We don't even watch TV like that any more, so why is it OK to do life-or-death studies the same way?

But what sets my brain on fire is the insistence that women should not go to their doctors for a routine breast exam at regular intervals unless there is raging breast cancer in their immediate families. And it gets worse. The breast self-exams that I've been told to do every month - yes, every month, not every two or three years - are now strongly discouraged on the grounds that it may lead to that horrific possibility, a "false positive".


This, the study insists, will only lead to unnecessary anxiety about nothing. We'll just worry our pretty little heads. We'll get all upset about losing a breast, like women do. If we think we feel a little lump, or for that matter a big one, we might (silly things!) become afraid we have cancer and be dead in a few months, then rush off to our doctors to get a professional opinion.


The answer? Don't do the self-exams.

For years and years (and years!), I felt infuriated about being badgered to DO the exams after every cycle.  Like most women, I felt tremendous guilt about forgetting to do them. The message seemed to be that the onus for early detection was on us. If we missed a lump, if one somehow turned up at our yearly checkup, well then. . .


The implication was that we could have done something about it much, much sooner if we'd only had the sense to know our own bodies.


That was back in the golden days of "Our Bodies, Ourselves" and the seizing of women's health care back from the patriarchy. But now I don't know what the hell is happening. It's as if I am being told NOT to know what is going on in my own body, in my own breast tissue, so I can tell what's normal and what isn't.


Why? The answer seems to be, it's better not to know. It only upsets us. We fret. We trot off to doctors. We even insist on mammograms, which have vague negative side effects that no one ever spells out.


Want to know the real reason?


Dollars.  It costs the medical system to give us those tests.

Never mind how much it costs us (though having a cancerous lump slowly and insidiously grow from barely perceptible to Stage 4 without our awareness might just cost us a little.) It costs the system to deal with these pesky little "false positives". I don't know how much; I don't have figures. But since this so-called study appears to be deeply flawed, yet is STILL being pushed at us as gospel, I feel a hidden agenda at work.



I've had bullshit statistics rammed down my throat for too long. Whenever the conclusions on women's health care suddenly lurch into reverse, I notice there is never an apology for the confusion and dismay and anger it causes. We're simply updating what "we" know.


Save me from this "we". It doesn't exist. "We" is Orwellian, a herd thinking that is always extremely dangerous because it is so often based on bias, not to mention bullshit. I honestly don't know how "statistics" like this can even be released, let alone  followed. Would you walk into Future Shop and try to buy an analog TV? Isn't breast cancer just a little more serious than that?

My worst fear is that next time a woman tries to book a mammogram, she won't be allowed to because she's considered too young, or not enough time has elapsed since the last one. Or perhaps doctors will begin to say, "No, I won't do a breast exam on you until you're over 50," leaving us to cope with that pea-sized lump we weren't even supposed to detect.



A breast exam at a doctor's office takes about a minute, maybe two. How much does that cost the system? If there's a "false positive" and the patient has to go for a mammogram and finds out there's nothing there, the result for her is immense relief. Why would the system want to take that away that peace of mind?


Ludicrous! The whole thng is ludicrous. And to me, it smacks of a not-so-subtle wrenching of control away from women and back to a medical system that has let us down time, after time, after time. Why does this bother us so much?  Why do we get all anxious and whiny and trot around doing "unnecessary" things to protect ourselves?



Because women die, that's why. They die. And we don't want to.

How often have I heard that most women find cancerous breast lumps themselves? I don`t have statistics rattling around in my head, but I`ve been hearing it for decades, quoted as an unassailable fact. If it`s true, and I believe it still is, how on earth can any study, anywhere, be so primitive, so flawed, so horribly disrespectful to women's wisdom and women's right to manage their own health care? Worse than that, how can the medical community blandly swallow it as accepted procedure?


I want an answer to one more question.

If all this disrespectful garbage becomes policy, which it may well do, how many small lumps will go undetected because we're really not supposed to touch ourselves there?



How many significant lumps won't be detected because our doctors will politely tell us they don't do breast exams any more until we are well past menopause?


How many deadly lumps will go undetected because our mammogram clinic will suddenly refuse our request for a screening test?  

To conclude, I can`t help but make the inevitable analogy to men's health care. My husband had a possible cancer scare a couple of years ago. Now, every six months, he goes in to see a specialist who does an uncomfortable manual test on him, just to make sure everything is still OK.


Applying the rules of this new study, he should not be going in because the exam might lead to a false positive, which could cause him "unnecessary anxiety" (read: which could take up the doctor's precious time). Instead, he's given the exam, mostly for his own peace of mind.

I hate this stuff, I really hate it. It stirs up fury in me. Fury because women are going to die from this, to actually die.  Even one death is too many, but my intuition (and haven't we been told for years to listen to our intuition?) tells me there will be many. It's the health care system instructing a woman to stick her head in the sand, because it's really better for everybody if she doesn't know.


But there are certain advantages to being dead, aren't there? The best one is, you can't complain.


http://members.shaw.ca/margaret_gunning/betterthanlife.htm