My story started in 1996 when I was 34 years old. My mother was diagnosed with Breast Cancer. I asked my doctor to please order mammograms for me since my mother had ductal carcinoma in situ. Every year I had a mammogram whether I had to pay for it or not. In January 2004 when I had just turned 40 and bought my first house 90 miles away from my doctor, I went for one last mammogram in my hometown.
Two weeks ago I wrote a blog about the frustration I am sensing from our friends on Facebook who are trying to figure out how they can get Pink Carts on their curb. Some people have haulers who are non-responsive or uninterested in doing something new. Some people can't order a Pink Cart online because the shipping is too expensive, despite our efforts to bring the price down. Others want to start petitions and have campaigned to their City Councils but haven't been able to show enough support from their neighbors and community members to bring Pink Carts to their curbs.
In March of 2010 I signed up for the Susan G. Komen Breast Cancer 3-Day in Washington, D.C. The walk itself was 60 miles over 3 days, but the journey to get there was 7 months long, and completely changed my life.
One in eight women get diagnosed with breast cancer in their lifetime. And although my family - so far - was safe, as the mother of a teenage daughter, those odds were unacceptable. I was walking for all the mothers, the daughters, the sisters, and the friends who were the one in eight. And I was walking so that my daughter would not be.
You know those people movers they have in airports? The ones where you think ‘should I or shouldn’t I’ because you know that you really do need the exercise and you should walk but they are so appealing. The way they stretch out for as far as the eye can see, and you don’t really have to move a muscle to get from A to B if you don’t want to. I certainly need the exercise but succumb to its lure almost every time.
It's a new year! This has been my motto the past several years. I had a heart attack at age 41, a massive pulmonary embolism in both lungs at 43 ... and was diagnosed with breast cancer last summer ... at age 45. My diagnosis followed the recent deaths of my sister and my mother. I was definitely looking for something positive to happen, not breast cancer.
Our PINK cart community continues to grow by leaps and bounds. When we first launched our facebook page last spring, I asked all my friends and family to 'like' our page and as it turned out I had exactly 19 people in my circle that could do so. 19, how pathetic, but it didn't take long before we hit 1,000 then 10,000 and now we are approaching 30,000, which is remarkable. I love reading everything that people write and I spend too many hours paining over the stories and experiences that people share because I am compelled to listen.