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WELCOME TO CANCERLAND
A mammogram leads to a cult of pink kitsch
By Barbara Ehrenreich

Barbara Ehrenreich is a contributing editor to Harper's Magazine. Her last two essays for the magazine were the basis
for her best-selling book, Nickel and Dimed: On (Not) Getting By in America, published by Henry Holt.

En excerpt - the original is amazing:

When, my three months of chemotherapy
completed, the oncology nurse calls to congratulate
me on my "excellent blood work results," I
modestly demur. I didn't do anything, I tell her,
anything but endure--marking the days off on
the calendar, living on Protein Revolution canned
vanilla health shakes, escaping into novels and
work. Courtesy restrains me from mentioning the
fact that the tumor markers she's tested for have
little prognostic value, that there's no way to
know how many rebel cells survived chemotherapy
and may be carving out new colonies right
now. She insists I should be proud; I'm a survivor
now and entitled to recognition at the Relay for
Life being held that very evening in town.

So I show up at the middle-school track where
the relay's going on just in time for the Survivors'
March: about 100 people, including a few men,
since the funds raised will go to cancer research
in general, are marching around the track eight
to twelve abreast while a loudspeaker announces
their names and survival times and a thin line of
observers, mostly people staffing the raffle and
food booths, applauds. It could be almost any
kind of festivity, except for the distinctive stacks
of cellophane-wrapped pink Hope Bears for sale
in some of the booths. I cannot help but like the
funky small-town Gemutlichkeit of the event, especially
when the audio system strikes up that universal
anthem of solidarity, "We Are Family,"
and a few people of various ages start twisting to
the music on the gerry-rigged stage. But the money
raised is going far away, to the American Cancer
Society, which will not be asking us for our
advice on how to spend it.

I approach a woman I know from other settings,
one of our local intellectuals, as it happens, decked
out here in a pink-and-yellow survivor T-shirt and
with an American Cancer Society "survivor
medal" suspended on a purple ribbon around her
neck. "When do you date your survivorship from?"
I ask her, since the announced time, five and a
half years, seems longer than I recall. "From diagnosis
or the completion of your treatments?"

The question seems to annoy or confuse her, so
I do not press on to what I really want to ask: At
what point, in a downwardly sloping breast-cancer
career, does one put aside one's survivor regalia
and admit to being in fact a die-er? For the
dead are with us even here, though in much diminished
form. A series of paper bags, each about
the right size for a junior burger and fries, lines the
track. On them are the names of the dead, and inside
each is a candle that will be lit later, after
dark, when the actual relay race begins.

My friend introduces me to a knot of other
women in survivor gear, breast-cancer victims
all, I learn, though of course I would not use the
V-word here. "Does anyone else have trouble
with the term "survivor?" I ask, and, surprisingly,
two or three speak up. It could be "unlucky,"
one tells me; it "tempts fate," says another, shuddering
slightly. After all, the cancer can recur at
any time, either in the breast or in some more
strategic site. No one brings up my own objection
to the term, though: that the mindless triumphalism
of "survivorhood" denigrates the dead
and the dying. Did we who live "fight" harder
than those who've died? Can we claim to be
"braver,' better, people than the dead? And why
is there no room in this cult for some gracious acceptance
of death, when the time comes, which
it surely will, through cancer or some other
misfortune?

No, this is not my sisterhood. For me at least,
breast cancer will never be a source of identity or
pride. As my dying correspondent Gerri wrote: "IT
IS NOT O.K.!" What it is, along with cancer
generally or any slow and painful way of dying, is
an abomination, and, to the extent that it's manmade,
also a crime. This is the one great truth that
I bring out of the breast-cancer experience, which
did not, I can now report, make me prettier or
stronger, more feminine or spiritual--only more
deeply angry. What sustained me through the
"treatments" is a purifying rage, a resolve, framed
in the sleepless nights of chemotherapy, to see the
last polluter, along with, say, the last smug healthinsurance
operative, strangled with the last pink
ribbon. Cancer or no cancer, I will not live that
long of course. But I know this much right now
for sure: I will not go into that last good night with
a teddy bear tucked under my arm. --

Posted by debutaunt at October 6, 2007 11:13 PM