Saturday was the first annual T.E.A.L. Walk in Brooklyn’s Prospect Park, and Team Slayer came out to support ovarian cancer research despite the rain. Those who couldn’t make it were there in spirit. Check out some of the photos.
slayer gyrl
team slayer
roger and alisa
me & seimond
bernard & kam
slayers
crossed the finish line
a snapshot of my teal Tweets
Who knew a color could be so significant? This week, I found myself giving teal shout-outs on Facebook and updating my Twitter status with all sorts of teal references. I even got my nails painted “teal the cows come home” blue.
Never before has a singular shade figured this prominently in my life, but I guess that makes sense. Teal is the official ovarian cancer color, which really didn’t mean much to me until last year. My how things have changed. Now, it’s the holiest hue around.
This month, teal is especially important. September is Ovarian Cancer Awareness Month, a time when survivors and our advocates unite to educate people about the disease.
Recognizing the symptoms is undoubtedly the most important factor. Ovarian cancer was once thought to be asymptomatic, but it turns out that most women experience bloating, pelvic or abdominal pain, difficulty eating, or feeling full quickly. The catch, though, is that by the time a woman recognizes the symptoms, the disease has likely spread or reached its later stages.
To date, there is no definitive screening test. And the five-year survival rate, a paltry 47 percent, has not changed much over the last 40 years. But if caught early, it increases to about 90 percent. Clearly, detection is critical. So is knowing your family history.
The Ovarian Cancer National Alliance, the Ovarian Cancer Research Fund, and the National Ovarian Cancer Coalition have been dedicated to getting the word out. More recently, L’Oreal launched its Color of Hope campaign to promote awareness.
My own calendar is filling up quickly with color-themed events. I’m kicking it off next week at the T.E.A.L. Walk in Brooklyn’s Prospect Park, and I’m proud to say that I’m walking as part of Team Slayer. Afterward, we’re all heading to my place for a round of tealtinis, my new favorite drink.
Filed under ovarian cancer awareness
Going to a support group is something that never really appealed to me. For some illogical reason, I can blog about my life’s story to the world, but I find it uncomfortable to sit in a room full of cancer patients discussing the state of my illness.
At first, I thought it was because talking about this disease can be rather depressing. The percentage of women who make it — less than 50 percent — isn’t much to boast about. But I often write about ovarian cancer, and I’m supposed to speak at several functions by year’s end, so that couldn’t be it.
Then, last week, I met with med students at Weill Cornell Medical College as part of the Survivors Teaching Students program, and it clicked. I function best when I feel like I’m moving forward.
Talking about the past and how I arrived here isn’t how I want to feel kinship. I’d rather find it by helping others. I’m not diminishing the role of cancer support groups. Everyone copes differently, and in my case, it just isn’t the right fit.
Now, holding court in front of future doctors? Well, that’s right up my alley.
A simple but ingenious program, Survivors Teaching Students places ovarian cancer patients in medical-school classrooms to share personal stories and information about the disease. Who better for the troops to learn from than the folks in the trenches?
As the fledgling physicians looked on intently, I told my story. I encouraged them to establish relationships with patients and never let race or age bias determine how they treat individuals. (I decided to skip the part about how my family thought I should sue my original doctor for misdiagnosing me. We were bonding, so I figured that little tidbit might not be appropriate to share.)
Afterward, the students asked really good questions: “How can doctors support their patients after a cancer diagnosis?” “What clued you in that something was wrong?” “How effective are new anti-nausea and pain medications?”
This was real dialogue happening, and I was leading it. And it was exciting! By the end of the session, I felt like I had been called to service and had prepared my unit to go out into the world and save lives.
Next week, I’m off to Wagner College in Staten Island, and I’m already anticipating it. In a strange turn of events, it seems as if the students have become the support group I never imagined wanting.
Is this really how we want to carry on a debate about health care?
One of my dad’s favorite and often-repeated sayings is you can’t always expect adults to act like grown-ups. Tune into the latest round of health care town halls for exhibit A.
Over the last week, I’ve been amazed at the shouting, the anger, and the disrespect on display by people who are, frankly, too old to be throwing tantrums.
I’m not suggesting that health care reform isn’t an emotionally charged issue, or that it isn’t complex and sometimes confusing, or that everyone should agree with President Obama’s plan.
I understand that a significant number of Americans don’t support the idea of universal care, and however short-sided that position may be, I’m all for hearing differing opinions on a matter that will affect each of us.
But when folks grossly exaggerate aspects of a bill that hasn’t even been approved yet, or are more interested in hyperbole than honesty, their acrimony becomes the focus rather than any valid points they might have to offer. In fact, what’s happening at these “debates” on health care reform is that people are doing everything else but debating health care reform.
Irate individuals are using these forums to berate the president and to complain about where the country is heading — in their minds, down an irreversible path to total government control akin to 1984.
It’s madness really, because as our nation approaches a crossroads regarding health care, it’s in our best interests to act like adults. It’s counterproductive to go around bellowing like brats, brandishing handguns at public meetings, or spray painting people’s private property with swastikas when you don’t agree with them. We’re losing focus fast.
Our health care system is not sustainable. And unless we take the time to address it now, it’s going to implode. Refusing to examine what’s not working and what we can do better out of some misguided sense of fear is exactly what we can’t afford to do. Too many of us are uninsured or underinsured. And those of us with coverage are watching our costs increase.
So rather than giving air time to folks like Sarah Palin, who is intent on spreading misinformation about why a government health care option is “downright evil,” we should focus our efforts on pushing the discussion forward in a mature manner. Don’t we owe it to ourselves?
I realize I’m one of the lucky ones. I have health coverage, and I believe everyone else should, too. After I got sick, I learned firsthand just how crucial it is. But I also understand that universal care won’t be easy to accomplish. Concessions will have to be made to the bill currently before Congress, and we’ll have to figure out how to pay for it. Estimates are at $1 trillion over the next 10 years, a hefty sum indeed. But, according to the Congressional Budget Office, our nation is on track to spend $2.4 trillion to fund the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.
Clearly, we need to rethink our priorities. And while we’re at it, let’s rethink how we engage each other during televised meetings about the future of our nation’s heath.
We can start by putting on our grown-up panties.
Filed under health care, the uninsured and underinsured
How is this even possible? According to a piece that appeared in the New York Times, women who have their ovaries surgically removed have an increased risk of getting lung cancer.
Sigh.
As if living without ovaries isn’t already a kick in the crotch. Now most of us have to worry about our lungs — organs that until last week seemed totally unrelated to the reproductive system?
Yes, according to scientists at the University of Montreal. Their research demonstrates that for some odd reason, women who undergo medically induced menopause (pretty much every ovarian cancer patient) almost double their chances of developing lung cancer.
And get this: None of this applies to women who enter menopause naturally. Did I mention how unfair this is? Does it sound like I have ovary envy?
Okay, on a very basic level, I understand that the organs in the body are all related. That is that they act in tandem to keep us alive. But the organs in question are nowhere friggin’ near each other.
Then again, studies report weird links all the time, and despite how bizarre they sound, they’re generally unearthed by people who know way more than I do.
Cell phones and skull-penetrating radiation, for example, milk and acne, caffeine and miscarriages. How about medicines and diseases? The very things designed to cure us often have extraneous, but no less debilitating, side affects. Women who undergo estrogen-replacement therapy — plenty of ovarian cancer patients, of course — are known to have a higher risk of coronary heart disease. And chemo can cause acute memory loss.
Hold on, hold on, hold on!
Can a slayer gyrl get a break? I already have chronic shoulder pain and insomnia. Oh, and lately, I’ve been breaking out into really unattractive sweats at the most inappropriate times. Probably the most embarrassing was when I got my makeup professionally done for an on-camera interview in Washington, D.C., a few weeks ago.
The makeup artist was almost done. I mean, putting on the last touches when the perspiration started pooling on my face. One minute I’m glammed up and looking fabulous; the next, I’m ruining the immaculately applied foundation with my exuding salty moisture. Then I downed a glass of water flavored by the layers of sticky lip gloss I was wearing. Not a good look — right down to the dark rings of underarm sweat that stained my cotton shirt.
So, it’s pretty clear that I have a lot going on. Between not sleeping, finding a clinical-strength deodorant that doesn’t smell like medicine or menthol, and slaying one cancer, I don’t have time to worry about the next malady. My schedule is pretty full.
Filed under if it ain't one beast, musings on cancer and chemo
I just wrote a piece for the Root.com (a site headed up 
by the very newsworthy Harvard professor Skip Gates) about race and cancer outcomes. It was a response, actually, to a story that appeared on Slate.com.
Conservative columnist William Saletan, after analyzing a National Cancer Institute study that reveals African Americans with gender-based cancers have a “significantly worse overall survival rate” than whites, concluded that the likely reason is genetic differences in our racial makeup.
The NCI study found that black Americans are 21 to 61 percent more likely than whites to die from ovarian, breast, and prostate cancers, even when dynamics such as income, education, and access to medical care are factored in.
The findings could point to any number of things, such as our community’s disturbing history of late-stage diagnoses, which could be the result of a misguided but reasonably understandable mistrust of the medical community.
Saletan, however, argues that it’s our DNA. There’s just one problem with his theory: It’s wrong.
There is no gene that equals black or white, or any race for that matter. When it comes to the human genome, we’re all pretty much the same. Here’s what Saletan has to say:
“Denying that race is real or that genes play a role in racial differences is just as simplistic as pretending that race explains everything or that discrimination has vanished.”
He goes on to proclaim that people are afraid to acknowledge genetic differences along racial lines for fear it will “lay a scientific foundation for segregation.”
Hello? The Bell Curve? The Tuskegee Experiment? The African slave trade?
We don’t have to look far to see how race and “DNA coding” can be dangerously manipulated for financial or social gain. And when it comes to medical classifications, that notion just smacks of so-called genetic inferiority. Saletan wastes no time supporting this idea, too.
In discussing his theory on biology and black Americans, he references a column he wrote two years ago about race, heredity intelligence, and the reasons white American kids have higher IQs than black American kids. They have bigger brains, he claims. So, from his perspective, if biological determinism manifests itself in intelligence, it makes sense that it would extend to health outcomes, too.
But here’s the real deal: Discussing genetic differences based on race sidetracks us from the issue at hand, which is closing the cancer survival gap, the original purpose of the study. The fact is that a more comprehensive analysis is needed, and this is where documenting the health trends of ethnic and racial groups becomes important. It is indeed worth exploring.
There’s little doubt, for instance, that obesity and stress exacerbate illnesses among African Americans, as does our diet. To make matters worse, African Americans don’t regularly visit a doctor, nor do we develop long-term relationships with medical professionals. Probably that mistrust creeping up again. But these issues are as much about social and environmental influences as they are about personal choices and lifestyle practices.
Saletan doesn’t appear to consider any of this before pronouncing our racial makeup the culprit. If you ask me, it’s because focusing on DNA is an easy way out. If people can point to a scientific explanation for why blacks don’t fair so well when battling cancer, then we don’t have to scrutinize our nation’s health care system or examine external contributors to poor survival outcomes.
The biggest danger, as Raina Kelley wrote in her column for Newsweek, is that we’ll start talking about medical conditions in terms of “us or them.” And, as history shows, that sort of deviation is just a big fat waste of time for everyone.
Filed under healthy and wise, musings on cancer and chemo
I tried to think of some clever way to wish MCA of the Beastie Boys a speedy recovery after hearing about his recent cancer diagnosis.
MCA, aka Adam Yauch
According to news reports, MCA (also known as Adam Yauch) is being treated for a malignant tumor found in his salivary gland.
Apparently, his cancer is highly curable and isn’t likely to damage his voice. That means that after his bout with the beast, he’ll still be able to perform and continue making music.
As a big-time Beastie Boys fan, I figure what better way to celebrate the good news and send well wishes to our boy than by paying tribute to Licensed to Ill, a rap classic that is helping me get through my own battle with cancer.
Without a doubt, Licensed is among my top fav rap albums of all time. It’s the kind of joint I can play from beginning to end. Twenty-plus years after its release, the singles “Paul Revere,” “The New Style,” and “Hold it Now, Hit it” bring out my inner B-gyrl with a vengeance. I’m talking break out the Adidas warm-up jacket and the shell toes with the fat laces.
The Beastie Boys’ second album, Paul’s Boutique, is widely considered the group’s best work, but Licensed brought a whole new flavor to the rap scene with its grimy lyrics and punk-inspired hip-hop beats.
Licensed to Ill, a hip-hop classic
I’ve listened to it repeatedly during my chemotherapy sessions, which are generally a few hours long and involve a lot of needles, plenty of sterilized tubing, and more chemo juice “than Picasso got paint.” So when I roll up to the cancer center, I have iPod in tow. And when it’s time for me to get hooked up to my meds, I throw on my earphones, sit back, and rock out for a while.
Needless to say, since I started treatment last year, there’s been a scruffy rap trio that has stayed in this slayer gyrl’s rotation. Rhyming along with the Beastie Boys definitely makes the time at the chemo suite go by faster, but there’s something deeper to it, too. Music is a balm for the soul. It triggers good memories and helps you escape the not-so-pleasant ones, like what led you to chemo in the first place. For me, Licensed does both.
As one-third of the crew that got me to pledge my allegiance to early hip-hop — and decades later is supplying the score to my cancer recovery — MCA holds a special place in my heart and on my MP3 player. I thought I’d return the favor by writing him this get-well ode. Just trying to be crafty (in the truest sense of the word, not the Beastie definition), from one newbie to another.
Filed under healthy and wise, musings on cancer and chemo
