Pinked Out

In case you never set foot in a store in October or never see fliers or listen to the radio or are just a damn hermit, this month is the national breast cancer awareness month.

Sigh.

I have conflicted feelings about this month. For one thing, it's great that women, patients, advocates, physicians, families, everyone is coming together to raise awareness and funds for treating and eliminating breast cancer. It's the second most common cancer in women (after skin cancer), and the risk of getting it is about 1 in 8. It comes in lots of different varieties, from relatively benign to very lethal, and it has a huge economic impact when you look at lost productivity and money spent on care.

But holy shit, give me a break with the freaking pink stuff. I walked into the grocery store the other day and was greeted by a table full of pink iced cupcakes, pink magnet decals for cars, pink dishtowels, and a lot of other stuff. There are no real regulations about all those pink items out there for sale, and read the fine print carefully, because there's no real obligation to give any portion of sales to an organization like Susan G. Komen for the Cure or anything like that.

It's all just playing off of feelings, too, which is what drives me nuts. Buying cupcakes with a pink ribbon on top is supposed to make me feel stronger or something. Beats me. In the mean time, you'll eat lots of pink stuff and get fat, and fat in women produces hormones that can be related to breast cancer.

I'm glad to see people united, but at the same time, breast cancer has a pretty good treatment rate. Where's the love for the other cancers? What about multiple myeloma, a blood cancer my grandfather was diagnosed with? What about anal cancer, which makes people snicker? What about pancreatic cancer, which is incredibly fatal, most of the time?

I know that whenever there's a big cause to rally around, people will try to profit off it. That's what business does. I know that women are more proactive in their health, typically, than men, and that's why a disease that usually strikes women gets so much attention. (How come we so rarely hear about the guys who get breast cancer?) But I also know that most people out there with cancer do NOT have breast cancer, and we shouldn't forget about all of them and their need for treatment and disease elimination as well.

And as a complete aside, October is a pain in the ass for me. I've got to write some kind of story with a breast cancer angle, otherwise readers will get ticked off and think I'm stupid that I ignored the biggest health phenomemon on the calendar. But finding new angles, and especially new business angles, is really hard to do. I don't want to write the same story over and over. I can't just rely on this really fantastic survivor, because anybody who survives deserves lots of credit, and I'd feel crappy picking one person over another. Thank goodness for a few PR people I know who feel my pain and help come up with new stuff, though, otherwise I'd be miserable.

I'll be glad when October is over and even happier when researchers figure out a way to prevent breast cancer. I hope I live to see the day when it's a disease of ages past. I also hope it's soon, before I retire from being a journalist, so I can relish an October without all the over-wrought stuff.