SwanShadow Thinks Out Loud

It’s that time again: October is National Breast Cancer Awareness Month.

If you’ve read this blog often over the past six-plus years, you know that the cause of breast cancer awareness is close to my heart — no pun intended. My wife KJ was first diagnosed with breast cancer in September 2000. In February 2007, a metastasis (that’s a fancy medical term meaning “spread”) of the disease was identified.

And, as most of you know, breast cancer finally claimed KJ’s life on July 5 of this year. She was 44 years old. She had spent nearly one-fourth of her life battling this miserable disease.

We need a cure for breast cancer. Not within the next generation. Not within the next decade. Not a year from now. Today.

Every 69 seconds, a woman somewhere in the world dies from breast cancer. You can’t read that statistic and not be horrified.

One in eight women will be affected by this disease. Your mother. Your sister. Your lover. Maybe you.

If you’re a woman, talk with your personal physician about the preemptive testing program appropriate to your individual risk factors.

If you’re not a woman, encourage all the women you know to follow the above advice.

If you have a few loose dollars in your wallet, consider donating them to the breast cancer charity of your choice. If you need help selecting one, KJ’s favorite was Susan G. Komen for the Cure.

Let’s stop having to read obituaries like this one.

This entry was posted on October 1, 2010 at 1:13 am and is filed under Breast Cancer Awareness, Dead People Got No Reason to Live, SwanStuff, That's Cool!. You can subscribe via RSS 2.0 feed to this post's comments. You can comment below, or link to this permanent URL from your own site.