Your Cancer Can Wait

Cancer Isn't The Only Thing We're Fighting

“Every cancer is a homicide.” –Boots Riley of The Coup (Everything)

 

There’s no other way for me to put this. Certain people, certain groups, don’t seem to particularly care if women die.

That’s the only explanation that I can come up with for the U.S. Preventive Services Task Force’s recent, stupid-as-fuck recommendation that women 40-49 forego routine mammograms and self-examinations. Before I start laying out a very personal anecdote, I want to ask a rhetorical question. Does this shit even sound like it makes sense? I mean, really.  Does this seem like good advice? It doesn’t. Certainly not to my mind, and surely not to the millions of courageous women who have survived breast cancer.

My wife is one of them. She was a tad under 50 years old – 36 to be exact – when she was diagnosed with breast cancer. She has no history of any kind of cancer in her family. She’s never smoked cigarettes (or marijuana, which is kind of weird if you ask me). She’d never previously been exposed to any radiation. In short, she was extremely low-risk. She happened to discover a lump in her breast during a self-examination and immediately went to get it checked out.

Her doctor referred her to get a biopsy. The results of the biopsy revealed a deadly little cancerous mass that had to be immediately removed. Fortunately for us, it was a stage one diagnosis that required an hour-and-a-half surgery, eight weeks of radiation treatment and, miracle of miracles, no chemotherapy. Now, some eight months after her initially diagnosis, she’s officially a survivor.

But you know what? My wife’s entire medical team, the doctor who performed the biopsy, her surgeon, her oncologist and her radiologist, all admitted that they were seeing more and more cases of young women being diagnosed with breast cancer. If Dr. Diana Petitti, vice-chair of the U.S. Preventive Services Task Force, and her colleagues were sincerely operating in the best interest of women, they would have spent their time investigating the implications of THAT shit, as opposed to telling young women that they needn’t concern themselves with regularly-scheduled mammograms.

Now that the backlash is in full swing, the task force is seeking to clarify it’s position. Tellingly, Dr. Petitti admits that the reaction from the report caught her off guard.  She concedes that, “we probably, in retrospect, could have been more clear.” Actually, I don’t agree.  I think they were crystal clear.  Their message was very simple: “We don’t give a damn.”