Susan Komen, the Pink Ribbon, and Breast Cancer

As someone with tatas, and a mother-in-law with Stage 4 metastatic breast cancer, I figured I’d chime in.

Breast cancer is FAR from an easy, curable disease. We hear that if you get regular mammogram screenings, and it’s caught early, you’re practically in the clear. These are the stories Susan G Komen shares - the “For the Cure”, the Pink Walks, the I’m a survivor because of Susan crowd. There’s this guise of breast cancer being an easy-to-cure disease because of so many success stories… pushed by Susan Komen. How many Stage 1 and Stage 2 people do you hear of dying from breast cancer? You don’t. Instead, you hear that they fought it, got heavy chemo, and walked away a year later back to their lives.

Something that you don’t hear is this: “20% to 40% of all breast cancers will metastasize at some point.” Resource.

We’re told that 30% of all breast cancer patients will become metastatic in the future, spreading to other organs or areas and killing you. And metastatic breast cancer is the ONLY cancer of it’s kind that is not curable. There is no chemo for it, there is no treatment plan, there is no funding from Susan G Komen for it.

Take a few quick moments to look at what those pink ribbons pay for. The money you donate for those ribbons, in your checkout line, in the coin drop at the gas station, and walking in a pink shirt does not go to metastatic breast cancer research. Heck, it doesn’t even go to breast cancer research. It goes to awareness. You’re buying a pink ribbon so that they can make more pink ribbons, and advertise, and run marketing campaigns to sell more ribbons.

Remember when Susan G Komen sponsored the KFC buckets? Or the pink labels on yogurt containers? These foods contain chemicals that cause the cancers they’re supposedly trying to cure. Here’s a good article: Pink Ribbon Facade.

For even more of Susan’s brilliant pink washing campaigns over the years, which our donations and pink pride have paid for, check out this article.

There is a huge outcry from the metastatic breast cancer crowd, and once you’re in it, it’s hard to see the color pink as anything but an effing stain on real cancer research. It’s truly disgusting to see how many people are dying from a disease that the world thinks is curable, low-risk, and not nearly as important as lung and brain cancer.

“Sixty percent of the 2,000 people surveyed knew little to nothing about MBC while 72 percent believed advanced breast cancer was curable as long as it was diagnosed early.” Resource

Here’s something I learned very early on after my MILs diagnosis - all of the studies, articles, blogs, and support groups created by women with metastasized breast cancer are dead. There is no survival rate. If you make it to 3 years alive, you’d literally outlived everyone in your support group, or who was diagnosed around the time you were.

When my MIL started her journey, she got into a lot of private Facebook groups with MBC patients, with a few thousand members. This was a little over 2 years ago, and recently, she told me that she and only one other lady are still alive from that first year.

Think of all those cured patients that Komen advertises. You’d better believe that they didn’t do a follow up on the 30% that ended up dying within the following 10 years.

And here’s one more article, though old but just as appropriate, about misdiagnosis. The statistics are so off about breast cancer survival rates because of how MBC spreads. My mother in law had no lumps in her breast, but a sore arm that kept her up at night. Because of her crap insurance, an X-ray to see what the cause was was too expensive and she left it for over a year until she just stopped sleeping entirely. Eventually, after a lot of homeopathic remedies, manages, oils, and chiropractor appointments, her chiro Dr. ordered an X ray for her and offered to pay for it out of his own pocket.

She got the X ray, and that same afternoon, saw that cancer had eaten away at her humerus to the point that if she had fallen asleep, and rolled over, it would’ve broken. And after more tests, and weeks of scans, MRIs, etc that they are now painfully in debt from, they found that it was caused by breast cancer that spread from her breastbone to both sides of her pelvis and to her arm. And now, years later, she’s living with cancer. There isn’t a cure, and though she's now a cyborg with a metal humerus, we’re literally just waiting for it to spread somewhere else.

And in that spreading is where many people, over many decades, have come back after winning their fight against breast cancer, only to die from lung cancer, bone cancer, brain cancer (which is actually their breast cancer metastasized). The lack of research, and the misdiagnosis is truly disgusting.

SOURCE