It is October. Again. Pink ribbons. Heart wrenching stories of the stricken. Images of courageous smiling bald headed women in pink T shirts. Companies that donate a percentage of product proceeds to research if you buy this or that shampoo, yogurt, deodorant, or spaghetti sauce. Everyone gets on board the pink boat, unified by the desire to cure cancer.
Cancer Bitches ride a different boat. Many of us dread October. We won’t tell you that. We would seem angry ingrates for your kindness and concern, so we quietly put our heads down until it is over. We endure the media voices speaking in hushed low tones, using the lexicon of war: battle, warrior, survivor, victim, courage. We walk down streets and supermarket aisles festooned with pink ribbons. We skip article after breast cancer awareness article that highlights anti-cancer diets, anti-cancer exercise, anti-cancer vitamins, recent anti-cancer discoveries, coffee/wine/green tea/chocolate/aspirin/tumeric.
Read full article (post) here:
via open.salon.com
Me: It's well worth the read. I'm often a Cancer Bitch too, and I frequently grapple with many of the same issues that are brought up in "greenheron's" piece. Once you are diagnosed with something like BC, your whole social world transforms in order to accommodate (whether you like it or not) this new facet of yourself that everyone you know is whispering about, worried about, curious about, sorry about, flipped out about, optimistic about, pessimistic about, wanting to give you advice about...or even not giving a whit about. This new social scenario can be quite a challenge to navigate.
And there's more to bitch about, too! Stuff I have not touched on much, in this blog (hard to believe I haven't bitched about every single possible bitchable thing there is in relation to BC, but it's true, greenheron shines the light on a few things that I have neglected to properly bitch about!
Bitching, bitching, bitching. All too often equated to "whining", has really been getting a bad rap in contemporary American culture.I believe many often overlook one very important bitch.......THE RIGHTEOUS BITCH!
Posted by: John Underwood | Saturday, October 08, 2011 at 05:20 AM