Despite the cruel volatility and vagaries of breast cancer, I'm told the disease is pretty consistent.
There are the familiar expressions: stage 3, metastasis, remission and cure.
The nauseating treatments: radiation and chemotherapy.
And its recognizable symbols: The bald head. The Komen Race for the Cure. The pink ribbon.
But except for the month of October, when all the stops are pulled out in an awareness campaign, we hear little about all the work that has been done since Nancy Brinker promised her dying sister in 1982 to do everything in her power to put an end to the disease.
Brinker would go on to found Susan G. Komen and launch a global breast cancer movement.
Today that movement, which turns 35 next year, is considered the world’s largest grass-roots network of breast cancer survivors and activists in the world, fighting to save lives, empower people, ensure quality care for all and energize science to find the cures.
Last week, Brinker, in town to mark the 25th anniversary of Komen Atlanta, could barely contain her excitement.
Brinker’s sister didn’t survive cancer, but since the launch of the nonprofit that bears her name, government spending on breast cancer has increased from $30 million a year to over $850 million; the percentage of women who get regular screenings has doubled from 40 percent to 80 percent; death rates have decreased nearly 40 percent; and the five-year survival rate for early stage breast cancer has increased from 74 percent to 99 percent.
If that isn’t something to celebrate, I don’t know what is.
But Brinker didn’t come to Atlanta to celebrate her own work. She came to cheer the organization’s star affiliate, Komen Atlanta.
“They aren’t just the affiliate of the year, they are executing our mission in the way we intended,” Brinker said. “If we had a thank you card, there wouldn’t be one big enough for all the women they’ve helped to write their names on.”
And they’ve done that work in the face of some pretty difficult economic times.
When President Richard Nixon declared war on cancer in 1971, there was plenty of money flowing into the science of cancers.
“Today, it’s turned upside down,” Brinker said. “We have amazing science but don’t have enough money to translate that science into treatment fast enough and we are all frustrated.”
By her estimates, 539,000 people will die of various cancers this year. Around the world, 7 million people will die even though we know now what to do.
“It’s not what they don’t know, it’s how they are going to get what they know to the patients,” Brinker said. “We have to begin to use the data as a tool to turn the science into the most affordable, usable, accessible care.”
That means matching the disease with the therapy so doctors don’t waste money giving people medicine that’s not going to work.
Stone, executive director of Komen Atlanta, was diagnosed with stage 3 breast cancer in 2010.
Doctors called it HER2, an aggressive cancer that spreads rapidly through the body.
Stone credits Komen, which funded development of the drug Herceptin to treat the cancer, with saving her life.
Unlike chemotherapy drugs, targeted therapies like Herceptin kill cancer cells with little harm to healthy cells. Women who do not receive the therapy live on average just two years.
It’s why Stone, a former litigation attorney, decided to volunteer and ultimately work with the nonprofit.
“I’ve never been happier, but I have never worked harder,” Stone said. “The work is so personally and professionally satisfying because you know you are really making a difference.”
Each year, some 2,750 women in metro Atlanta are diagnosed with breast cancer and 500 of them die, Stone said, compared to 6,000 diagnoses in Georgia and 1,150 deaths. On average, women in metro Atlanta have higher breast cancer incidence and mortality rates. And African-American women in metro Atlanta are 40 percent more likely to die of breast cancer than their Caucasian counterparts.
To that end, Stone said Komen Atlanta has been busy working to reduce the mortality gap between white and black women by 25 percent within five years.
Specifically, she said Komen Atlanta will focus more resources in the African-American community from an educational standpoint and will continue to provide access to quality care.
That work includes the Worship in Pink Program, scheduled to launch Oct. 1 at faith-based organizations like churches and synagogues; providing screenings in areas where there is a large African-American population in order to increase early detection; and under a program called Sisters of Promise, encouraging black women to share their stories.
When she started Komen, Brinker said she thought it would take 10 years to blot cancer from the face of the Earth; after all, America had put a man on the moon.
It took just two days, she said, to realize she’d made a promise she was ill-equipped to see through.
“I thought, ‘How stupid am I,’” she remembered. “I knew I wanted a life with purpose, but I didn’t know this would be it.”
But Brinker soon realized that if she didn’t give a voice to breast cancer, no one would.
And so for the past 35 years, she has done that and more.
To this day, when we think of breast cancer, we think of Brinker's sister, Susan G. Komen, and the organization that bears her name. We think of the Race for the Cure and the pink ribbon.
And we think of affiliates — more than 100 of them across the country like Komen Atlanta — that are in the fight with her.
Brinker believes the next big hurdle for Komen will be getting people the care they need.
“I’m still stunned when I open my email and read the pleas for help from people who have been turned down by their insurance company,” she said.
“We’re not there yet, but we have never ever given up on our mission,” Brinker said.
Until they find a cure, I hope they never do.
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