29.3.15

A Memorable Opportunity to Learn About Breast Cancer

I have been very fortunate in my family to have never had a relative diagnosed with breast cancer, and after five years of covering events c... thumbnail 1 summary


I have been very fortunate in my family to have never had a relative diagnosed with breast cancer, and after five years of covering events centered around breast cancer awareness, I feel that my family should consider itself blessed.

The opportunity comes around each October to learn about breast cancer when charitable organizations, schools, sports teams and other organizations do what they can to promote breast cancer awareness month and provide funding through charitable events for breast cancer research.

I went to cover a walk for the cure event held at a local park and started talking to some of the women who were participating. They began to tell me all kinds of facts about breast cancer I had never known, such as the fact that one in every eight women will be diagnosed with breast cancer at some point in their lives, and that someone dies from breast cancer every 14 minutes.

Another fact that I learned about breast cancer was that about 15 percent of people who suffer from the disease are men. I stood there talking with a group of women for about an hour before I even began any interviews, and really got a sense of what the disease meant to people.

I heard heart-breaking stories about women who had to have both breasts amputated, only to die from the disease a few years later. One of the ladies politely told me that, as a man, the physical and emotional pain that goes along with that is something that I could never understand. I completely agreed.

One of the things that impressed me the most about this particular event was that everyone, man, woman and child, was dressed in pink, a tribute to those who are suffering or have died from the disease. Because I had learned so much about breast cancer, I decided that I had to do whatever I could to raise awareness as well, and was told by the son of a breast cancer survivor that putting the word out in our local newspaper was doing my part.

On a lighter note, a few weeks later I was covering a high school football game, and I was taking some notes when a colleague of mine looked over and saw that I was writing with a pink pen. He started to give me some flack about it, and asked where I had gotten the pen.

When I told him that I bought it at a breast cancer awareness fundraiser to show my support for the fight against the disease, he told me that he wished he could crawl under a rock and never come out.

I have learned so much about breast cancer in my time as a writer, and I feel like a better person because of that. There is still much work to be done in terms of finding a cure, but with the effort that so many people put in to raising awareness about the disease, I am hopeful that it is only a matter of time before it is a thing of the past.