Time to Say when a Spade is a Spade

Don't look at the time, just enjoy it.

My sister wrote the following honest words and posted them online today. Her courage, and humor throughout all of this is inspirational.

As Pinktober draws upon us, I've been feeling an increasing need to describe what it means to someone like me... It's also taken me over 18 months to work up the courage to talk openly about this. My aim here is not to scare anybody, but to educate.

Things that I've learned about breast cancer in the last 18 months: approx 10% of women (and some men) with breast cancer are diagnosed at Stage IV from the start - this is the final stage of cancer meaning that it's already spread to distant organs and/or bones. For these patients (and this includes me), there's no hope of being cured, only endless treatments until our bodies can't take any more, or until the cancer takes over anyway. Another fact: mammograms are not necessarily effective at picking up breast cancer if you're a younger woman and/or if you have what's known as dense breast tissue (I had five, yes, FIVE mammograms and ultrasounds in the 2 years preceding my diagnosis - not one of those scans detected any problems). And finally, if you're diagnosed with breast cancer as a younger woman, you are more likely to die from it, as younger women tend to have more aggressive forms of the disease.

When I was diagnosed with breast cancer, I honestly thought I was going to be okay. I thought to myself: this is going to take 6 months out of my life to do the all the treatments but I'll be FINE. I was breast aware thanks to various pink awareness campaigns, but I also thought, very naively, that I could never die from breast cancer. So I suppose that overall, Pinktober just makes me feel stupid.

Sometimes you have to admit that a spade is a spade.