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YOUR VOICE — By Laura Nikolaides • October 16, 2008 Breast Cancer Awareness Needs Fine-Tuning  Breast cancer awareness efforts have done a phenomenal service in the last 30 years. I am very grateful to those who have come before me and have made it possible for me to speak so easily about breast cancer, and for my children to not feel ashamed that their mother has this disease.However, there has been some unintended fallout from the incredible media and commercial blitz surrounding breast cancer awareness. One is that our daughters have become unnecessarily anxious about breast cancer. Even though breast cancer would be extremely rare in a teenager, Dr. Marisa Weiss, the president and founder of Breastcancer.org, found in a survey of more than 3,000 girls between 8 and 18 that 25 percent thought they had symptoms of breast cancer. It is important that we calm our daughters' fears, while giving them appropriate guidelines for breast health. The other unintended fallout during this month is that those women who have Stage IV, or metastatic, breast cancer often feel ignored and isolated. Many of these women had aggressive breast cancers, either diagnosed as metastatic from the beginning, or had the disease return many years later. They didn't fight any less hard than the rest of us, or ignore guidelines for early detection. Many of the most aggressive breast cancers happen in women under 40. Fortunately, much of the money raised by buying "pink" is going toward understanding the biology of different breast cancers, and to learn, most importantly, how to prevent a breast cancer from returning. Laura Nikolaides, who was diagnosed with Stage III breast cancer in 2007, is on the board of the Breast Cancer Alliance of Greater Cincinnati, and lives in Mason with her husband and three children. |
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