Cancer Schmancer
Sometimes the best gifts come in the ugliest packages. My odyssey in search of a proper diagnosis put me on the path of health, education and environmental advocacy. My experience taught me that turning pain into purpose heals. And so began the Cancer Schmancer Movement. We are dedicated to ensuring that all women’s cancers get diagnosed in Stage 1, when they are most curable. We want to replant the landscape of American health and environmental consciousness. We are the missing link. We ask hard questions that other people won’t ask unless there is a profit to be made. We are fighting for a new norm, where our health and the environment are the first priority.
My story is simple: I got famous, I got cancer and I lived to tell about it. It took me two years and eight doctors to get a proper diagnosis. How many people get a second opinion when the doctor is telling you that you’re essentially well? I went for seven second opinions and, ultimately, after two years of misdiagnosis and mistreatment, determined that I had uterine cancer. Fortunately, it is a relatively slow growing cancer, so I was still in Stage 1, but I had to get a radical hysterectomy. Other women are not so lucky. When you are misdiagnosed you waste precious time. Unfortunately, when cancer is most curable, in the earliest stages, the symptoms look identical to far more benign illnesses and misdiagnosis runs rampant.
We are living in a world where the medical community is bludgeoned by insurance companies to go the least expensive route of diagnostic testing. As a result, many subscribe to the philosophy, “If you hear hooves galloping don’t look for a zebra, it’s probably a horse.” As a consequence, 80 percent of women find out about ovarian cancer in the late stages and 70 percent of them will die of it, often being misdiagnosed for irritable bowel syndrome.
The diagnostic tests that are available and effective are not being offered to us because they can indicate maladies without identifying what is cancer and what is not. Insurance companies don’t want to pay for subsequent testing to determine if the problem really is cancer. Women are left without the kind of testing they need for early stage diagnosis. I have launched the Cancer Schmancer Movement to fix this problem and ensure that all women’s cancers get diagnosed during Stage 1, when they are most curable.
We are working to inform women about the early warning signs of women’s cancers and the tests that are available — because the tests you need may not even be on the menu at your doctor’s office. Once women know what is available, then we can demand it.
The Cancer Schmancer Movement parallels the women’s suffrage movement of a hundred years ago. They were marching to vote. Now, we are doing it to save our very lives. Since nobody can say they didn’t start out in a womb, it behooves us all, both women and men, to keep them healthy.
There is a great deal of synergy between Waterkeeper Alliance and the Cancer Schmancer Movement because, at the end of the day, we’re all in the same boat. How we take care of each other and the world is the same thing.
We need to start making louder noise on Capitol Hill because you can be sure that corporate lobbyists are already up there making industry concerns loud and clear. Until we galvanize as voters and make clear that the people are more powerful than the corporate lobbyists, we don’t exist, we’re invisible, a silent majority.
When we make our elected officials accountable for their votes, then we’ll take back our government and make it the people’s government, as it’s supposed to be. This nation is being run like a corporation, and we’re just employees. But the jig is up.
Eventually, the idea of doing anything that soils the water that keeps us alive will be thought of as incogitable. We will wonder how people allowed beauty products to consist of carcinogens. The daughters of tomorrow will look back and thank us, the visionaries of today, who tried to ensure that all women’s cancers get diagnosed early, so they inherit a world where no woman has to die of cancer due to late stage diagnosis.
