October & Awareness

The Fountains in Kansas City Parks are pink this month – their nod to Breast Cancer Awareness Month.

As the father of a wonderful young woman who lost her fight to breast cancer at the age of 32, I’m already more aware of breast cancer than anyone should ever be asked to be.  I pray constantly that a cure will come so that no one ever again has to endure what Shanna did; so that no one feels the pain her mother and sister still feel today.  I pray that no more children have to grow up like my grandsons, with only wispy, sketchy, memories of the fantastic young woman who gave them life.

On one level, I understand pink fountains, but my more visceral reaction is a a resentment of the empty symbolism it represents to me.  The Race for the Cure that now runs in almost every major city in the country provides something to do to hundreds who otherwise feel powerless to help loved ones afflicted.  That is truly a good thing, and I wonder if there is a single female over twelve anywhere in America that doesn’t understand the importance of regular self-exams.

Still,  despite our best intentions, no pink ribbon has ever cured a single cancer.  Not one.  Not yet.

I think the thing that bothers me most is what a big business Breast Cancer fund raising has become. 

The Susan G Komen Foundation, along with corporate sponsors like Yoplait, Ford, Remax and Kentucky Fried Chicken,  raises a gazillion dollars a year for programs, scholarships and grants. 

Fox Sports has recently affiliated itself with the Breast Cancer Research Foundation, a group that claims to fund the most advanced and promising avenues of research.

That’s all good, but I worry that the high-powered public relations push, all the emphasis on breast cancer, has to be taking away from other desperately needed research into other, less advertized, less glamorous diseases.  After all -and here’s where awareness plays a role- Breast Cancer is not the number one killer of women; it does not even cause the most fatalities among cancers.  According to statistics for the most recent year I could find on record, the American Cancer Society ranked Breast Cancer as the number four killer, behind cancers of the lungs, reproductive system and the colon.