Showing posts with label teal. Show all posts
Showing posts with label teal. Show all posts

Tuesday, January 28, 2014

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.






Friday, October 21, 2011

When your toenails match your flip-flops



It's not every day that a woman's toenails match her flip-flops.

Yesterday I wrote about a bizarre dream I had about ovarian cancer. Though doctors kept insisting I had it, no one seemed to be interested in treating it. They implied that I was being a hypochondriac for worrying about it and should wait until the pain became "unbearable" to begin treatment.

Was there more to this dream than I thought?




I've also written, at length (and how!) about the "pink" crusade against breast cancer (I almost said "for" breast cancer) and about how it has mowed down all other disease-related campaigns. I'm afraid it has, folks, with an oversaturation that is beginning to make me frankly sick.

Yes, we need awareness of the various types of cancer that women (and men, and children) suffer and die from. We need to campaign, but this aggressively? The breast cancer juggernaut has grown so formidable now that they can and do use the word "boobies" in their merchandise without any sense that it is insulting to women.

There is no comparable term for an ovary, yet when it becomes diseased, the outcome can be fatal. In many cases there are few, or even no symptoms. No x-ray, no blood test, not even a palpation to determine if you have it or not.




In my dream, the doctors sort of guessed at the diagnosis, then left me pretty much alone with it except for a useless, generic "support group".  It was a nightmare, of course. Now that I've had some time to mull it over, I think I can see why the "ovarian movement" has chosen such a strange emblem.

At first glance, it's odd. You're supposed to paint your toenails teal. I guess I'm an old stick-in-the-mud (and my toes are ugly enough to frighten small children), but I can't bring myself to do it. And I just don't see that many teal toenails around.

For one thing, they'd only be visible during flip-flop weather. That limits their visibility considerably. Older women might be a little reluctant. Though the campaign insists the teal polish is widely available, I wonder if that's true.





The truth is, this rather strange campaign is an attempt to survive the pink tsunami that has pretty much drowned other diseases. I also suspect all the other colours had already been taken.  A lot of men probably don't  know what the word teal means, and to me it's a sort of military color. It also has so many shades that it's hard to fix on it exactly (whereas, for some reason or other, pink is pink: a colour both innocuous, as in baby girls, and fluffily sexy, as in Playboy bunnies).

But you have to give them credit for trying something original. I'm afraid we've come to the point of  Not-Another-Charity Syndrome, and (as I wrote yesterday) ovaries just aren't as cute, fun, perky and sexy as (slim, attractive young women's) breasts. They scare us. They pump out hormones, spew out eggs. And they're even more dangerous when they STOP spewing out eggs.





And even if they are the source of life itself, which they are, there's an odd sort of stigma attached to them. They're reproductive organs, not bouncy fun sexual attractants hiked up into enticing cleavage by lacy bras. Ovaries aren't sexy. Think about it. See any irony here?

But boobs (sorry, breasts) mean. . . what? A sexual turn-on for men. (Come on, admit it.) A badge of youth, at least the perky high ones. Part of a womanly shape: i.e., at puberty these things just pop out, like it or not, and you have them for the rest of your life. They also mean, and many people think of this with disgust, the ability to literally feed and nurture a baby, to keep it alive with your own body. Do it, yes, but do it alone, in a dark public washroom or, better yet, at home.

So for some, the purpose for which breasts are designed is somehow disgusting. So the campaign must have decided to focus on the "fun" aspects of breasts, the cheerleaders with bouncy little tits, the tight pink tshirts with "provocative" slogans on them. The boobies.




Leaving the ovarian camp scrambling for something that hasn't already been taken.

I can't tell at this stage of my life if I'm going to get ovarian cancer or not. At this point it's a dread-word, sort of like "pancreatic": many people see it as a death sentence.

Meantime, on the pink front, the news is better. Early detection means you just might be able to keep those perky little organs and survive.

I wish the teal-toe brigade well, but there's something kind of strange about it, a contradiction: proclaim it, but at the same time keep it hidden.  The thing is, people are NOT going to ask you about your pedicure if you wear normal shoes, which most people in Canada do for 10 months of the year (and, around these parts, 11 or 12 months).  And the color (darkish blue-green) is, for most people, a little too goth to be flattering. Those who don't ask about it might wonder why you chose such an oddball shade.




I can hear the ovarian camp asking me: well, do you have a better idea? I'd include some sort of egg imagery, but people might find that just as disgusting as breast- feeding. Eggs? What does that have to do with ovarian cancer?

The body is the arena for cancer, and it can strike like a cobra and do its deadly business anywhere. North Americans have so much shame and disgust about the body that they must cloak diseases like cancer in terms that are, sometimes, downright cute. Makes it more palatable, somehow.

I'd like to see stats on how much these two causes bring in annually. It would probably cause ME disgust, but for reasons of my own.

http://members.shaw.ca/margaret_gunning/betterthanlife.htm
(The following is from the tealtoes.org web site.)



Raising Ovarian Cancer Awareness


 

The Story of Teal Toes
Scene: School bus stop, the week after Labor Day.
(Usual hellos, how's the school year going etc.)
Tori:Wow! New pedicure?
Carey:Yeah!
Susan:What color is that? Blue?
Carey:No, it's teal. September is Ovarian Cancer Awareness Month and teal is the awareness color.
Judy:Gorgeous. Ovarian cancer? Isn't that what that new vaccine is for?
Carey:No, there is nothing like that for OC. In fact, it is often not diagnosed until the disease has progressed.
Tori:But I thought that is what we get a pap smear for!
Carey:Nope, there is no test for OC. The symptoms are often hard to see. They are:
  • Bloating
  • Pelvic or abdominal pain
  • Difficulty eating or feeling full quickly
  • Urinary symptoms (urgency or frequency)
Judy:I think a friend of mine's mother had that. She just thought it was a tummy thing until it was too late. Why haven't we heard more about this?
Carey:That's why I painted my toes! So people would ask!
Susan:Who did them?
Carey:That new nail place over by the theater. They carry all the OPI colors, including this special teal.
Tori:Hey, let's go tomorrow! Meet me there!
This "conversation" was compiled from the various conversations I had at the bus stop, gym, yoga class, a bridal shower and various other places this past September after painting my toes teal. There were many other teal toes by the end of the month.
Ovarian cancer is called the silent killer, it whispers. We have all been bombarded with information about breast cancer, it's time to extend this awareness to its "cousin", ovarian cancer (the "breast cancer gene" can also trigger ovarian cancer).
Ideas for a "Teal Toes" campaign:
  • September, Ovarian Cancer awareness month, is the perfect time for one last pedicure for a cure, and trying an "untraditional" color.
  • For most women, teal is an "untraditional" enough color that it does spark conversations, leading to further awareness.
  • While "untraditional", teal is nevertheless pretty!


This information is from the Ovarian Cancer National Alliance.