FARMINGTON – Breast Cancer Awareness Month is an annual international health campaign organized by major breast cancer charities every October to increase awareness of the disease and to raise funds for research into its cause, prevention, diagnosis, treatment and cure. The campaign also offers information and support to those affected by breast cancer.
Breast cancer awareness month is a yearly campaign that intend educate people about the importance of early screening, test and more. This campaign starts on Oct. 1 and ends on Oct. 31 every year.
Mindy Enman set a goal of $1,500 to raise doing $5 pink hair extensions throughout the month of October. All proceeds donated will go to the Harold Alfond Cancer Center in Augusta. Last week she was at Bangor Savings Bank in Farmington who called out all the other area Financial Institutions to join in.
We all know ladies we have lost and ladies who have survived breast cancer. Mindy, I hope your goal is way above and beyond what you have set. Keira still has her pink extension in her hair!
Come on Ladies! Lets help her meet the goal !
for the Cure!
Carol
I am very proud of you Melinda Sue!
Nice Work! The girls said they need one of those mugs.
Nice job, Mindy! You Rock!!
5 REASONS WHY YOU ACTUALLY *WANT* TO HAVE A MAMMOGRAM, PLUS 1:
Ok, for “Breast Cancer Awareness Month”, please pass along this info instead of meaningless, messageless pink ribbons that leave people vulnerable & uninformed. After all, you’d have to live under a rock not to be aware of cancer. When I avoided mammograms, I did not understand what I was saying “no” to. Now I technically have no breasts (just reconstructed parts from stomach tissue) so will never be given a mammogram again, but will be on cancer treatment the remainder of my life (“metastatic cancer”). I saw many pink ribbons before diagnosis, but still had to learn this info from personal experience.
YOU *WANT* TO HAVE A MAMMOGRAM BECAUSE:
1. Being proactive is your friend, denial is not. If you do have cancer, catching it early at stage 1, 2, or even 3 means less treatment, and avoiding longer seasons of really harsh treatments. The earlier it is found, the more likely and easier the cure.
2. Hiding from finding out if you have cancer because you don’t think you feel a lump or have symptoms is not effective cancer prevention. Cancer sneaks up on you, because it is not painful until very very late stages. It is better to know you don’t have it, than to have it and not know while it just keeps getting silently bigger. Mammograms can find cancer before it is big enough to feel or cause symptoms. A mammogram is not as uncomfortable as I expected, and the minor, very short lived inconvenience of doing it can save you far more enormous, ongoing, extreme “inconveniences” later. Worth it.
3. Cancer treatment has come a long way. I was more afraid of cancer treatment than cancer, but nowadays certain cancers with certain properties can be treated with immunotherapy that does NOT kill your healthy cells, make you sick and wish you could die. Immunotherapy does not cause hair loss, nausea, or loss of appetite. Often this is combined with toxic chemo (that does) when necessary, other times it can be used alone, but still it has changed the game by saving lives and improving quality of lives during treatment. Another improvement is now there are also excellent forms of nausea control they double you up on if you need toxic chemo, because they want you not to throw up on them, as much as you don’t want to feel nauseous. That’s a good thing! There is better hope and better quality of life in cancer treatment today then there was even 5-10 years ago.
4. You WANT not to need harsh treatments that can affect:
your ability to work;
your schedule (I kept over 100 appointments to see doctors, get treatments the 1st 12 months of diagnosis, now ~52/year);
your ability to do simple things for people you love;
how often you have to run to bathroom & if you can without help;
having hair on Any part of your body (you *like* having eyebrows & eyelashes, right?);
your ability to enjoy life;
your enjoyment of food;
your going through menopause sooner than expected or more than once (as in frequent hot flashes with anxiety repeated daily for 4+ years, after you already finished menopause years before);
your reasons for wearing turtlenecks & scarves (to hide: chemo port, semi-perm lines to guide radiation machine, gap between your breast prosthesis & chest wall, scars from surgical reconstruction);
your body forever in terms of scars, shape (dents and grooves where there use to be curves);
how your body functions hormonally (or cannot ever again);
your private sense of humiliation;
and the number of nice people with whom you are on a first name basis who have the word “oncology” in their job title.
5. No one is immune. Breast cancer can happen to anyone, yes, Even If You Did nurse all your babies. Breast feeding does not inoculate us against breast cancer in spite of what they told us. Also, you don’t have to have a history of cancer in your family to get cancer. You can get a type of breast cancer, (Inflammatory Breast Cancer) even without the gene. And you are not “too young” to get it. There is no such thing. I was 47 when 1st diagnosed, and I see women younger than I who are also in treatment. And it can even happen to men, too. Men are not going to talk about it, understandably so, but they still need to know it can.
Plus 1: YOU *WANT* TO HAVE A COLONOSCOPY because when they do the procedure, they do not only diagnose if cancer is present or not. If they see the start of cancer, they go ahead and remove it right then and there, and no more worries, no further treatment needed! So you either come out of colonoscopy with peace of mind bc you know you don’t have colon cancer, or with peace of mind bc you were about to but it was stopped! Pretty cool. As best I understand, this only works this easily if you are ahead of it, doing it as a routine check up before symptoms develop.
Now that you know, share this info liberally and unashamedly and save a life, because chances are, if you do, you will!