Organize and demonstrate in October at SGK headquarters

Let's go!

Thank you for opening this up to the rest of us. I'm "only" stage II but understand how little that means. Basically, "there but for the grace of God go I - for the moment" is how I view stage IV.

I find it absolutely appalling that there's so little understanding, so little concern, so little outrage and so few $$ spent regarding metastatic cancer. I do feel that SGK has done ALL of us a huge disservice by trivializing breast cancer with pink ribbons and runs.

Nor am I inclined to accept cancer as a chronic condition. That seems to me to be admitting defeat.

Thanks mods! Ah yes, Cancer as a chronic condition "just like diabetes or arthritis" guess what, AIs can and will give you both of those diseases to add to the mess we're already in - the only people I hear saying "chronic condition" are oncs.

No Abnerb, you did not make a mistake in moving the "Where is the Outrage" to an open forum. I had seen the posts under Stage IV and wondered how we could ever get more support  if all couldn't post. We are all in this together. This discussion along with the petition for Cancer Charities to put more money for funding let me know what we are up against. I just really started learning about cancer after my diagnosis in late February this year. I had been pinkwashed in my thinking too. I have posted the petition on my facebook page while telling my network of friends of my diagnosis. My husband has also posted to his. We do need to get the word out one by one. We are putting a face to the issue that our Stage IV sisters know too well. Yes, 30% of those with early stage need to find it out now and get the word out to their friends. I was also thinking that this is a much broader issue that needs to be raised.

Hi, Brenda - I'm sorry that you're dealing with low counts, etc. I appreciate your tenacity on this topic though.

I think one of the problems with the Advocacy forum is that it's just too far down the list. I suspect that people literally don't scroll down that far unless they're really looking for it. I wonder what would happen if it became a sticky somewhere near the top of the discussion boards?

Like you, I HATE to see this wither away. It's an issue that EVERY ONE OF US should have very strong feelings about!

Being stage II now is no guarantee that I'll stay stage II, and I know it. I don't like to sound like I'm expecting trouble but I certainly don't want to deny reality, either. Elizabeth Edwards was dx. at stage II, also.

I just watched the preview for the Emperor of All Maladies which airs on PBS from 3/30-4/1 (look for the thread on it for more details) but in the preview they state that they are going to discuss what the public can do.  I plan on watching and I hope several others here do too.

I've had this on my mind since you originally posted it Adnerb. I wanted to respond in more detail than my previous post, but I didn't think my response would be very popular. It just makes me sad that we all care so much and get nowhere, so I'm just going to spill my guts and get it off my chest so I can stop wallowing in it.

I don't know about what kind of ads get run in the US, but here in Canada, we're inundated with the dumbest ads you can imagine by the Canadian Breast Cancer Foundation, almost daily. The latest of which depicts all these women biking, hiking, swimming, running to that Natasha Bettingfield song "UNWRITTEN". The graphic that appears on the screen in big letters is " 1/3 of breast cancers can be prevented by living well". That alone annoys me, because I DID live well and it's going to kill me anyway. Point is, all these ads, whether that is their intention or not, blame us for our own breast cancer. Like lung cancer getting a bad wrap regarding smoking. We all know that non-smokers get it too, but the message is that it's their fault. It's a stigma and people are always going to read into it that way because of how is portrayed..... It's Your Own Fault.

In response to your initial post, and the AIDS advocacy, people's minds didn't really get on the bandwagon until sweet Ryan White made his story public. It gained more momentum after Elizabeth Glaser made her story public, even though the choice to do so was ripped away from them. In no way, shape or form could they be blamed. That's when people realized we had better stop assigning fault to AIDS and cure the damn thing.

As long as the public gets these "blame the person ads" thrown in their face, nothing is going to change and we only have the Breast Cancer Foundations to blame. They're supposed to be there to help (not unlike Komen), but instead they send out that subliminal message that we did something wrong to get this disease. If we can't rely on them to help, nobody else is going to.

I mentioned this in a prior post years ago. For almost 15 years, I canvassed for cancer. When I started, people were throwing money at me like you wouldn't believe. In the last couple of years, I barely got anything. People like to think it's the economy or whatever, but I know deep down in my heart, people are sick of funding a lost cause...they just don't say that's the reason. We are in a time where everything is possible yet a cancer cure eludes us? Don't buy it. Something else is going on but that's a post for another time.

While I was posting this, that moronic commercial came on twice. I want to barf.

Agreed Hopeful. You know what else is outrageous? My dad died of lung cancer in 1969 (non-smoker). I was diagnosed with bc in 1996. Our treatments were exactly the same. Surgery, radiation and mustard agent poisoning. Some progress.

Leggo, I understand and share your frustration. It's even harder to watch a parent go through cancer than to be dx. ourselves, at least for me.