My aunt died of breast cancer.  I’m sure most of you also either have relatives or even close, dear friends that you know who have battled with this cancer, as it is one of the top diseases that women get. In the metropolitan Cleveland area, the Susan G Komen foundation puts on a lot of fundraising events, all aimed at breast cancer awareness as well as raising money for the continued breast cancer research and additional technology needed to fight this killer cancer.   The most well known Susan G Komen foundation sponsored fundraiser is the Race for the Cure, where literally thousands of cancer survivors and advocates show up and run/walk to show their support and rack up monetary donations. 

Awareness is extremely important, because now most women know how important it is to get regular breast cancer screenings by their gynecologists once a year, as well as to perform monthly self breast exams to look for anything out of the ordinary, like lumps, fibrous masses, discharge from the nipple and other red flags that could or could not be a sign of cancer, but nonetheless always wise to follow up on. 

I just read how the Susan G Komen foundation started, and it is a truly inspiring story.  A woman started this foundation on behalf of her sister, who died at the young age of 36 years old of breast cancer back in the early 1980′s.  Her sister, on her deathbed, made her promise that she would help raise awareness and fight this terrible disease which had ravaged her body and taken her from her children much too early. 

The sister’s name that started the foundation is Nancy Brinker, and she has really brought this nonprofit organization a long way today.  She said she knew she had to make it big, make big splashes and go on PR jaunts to get the word out and get awareness going that breast cancer needed to be addressed as a serious and formidable disease that could be caught much earlier and treated if women only knew what to look for, and were educated on risk factors as well as the importance of getting mammograms and doing self exams to minimize the risk of the cancer spreading and also to minimize the risk of dying from the cancer.

 

This entry was posted on January 27, 2007 at 5:09 am. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

Posted in Breast Cancer Prevention by Breast News Girl No Comments Yet