Shouldn’t CANCER be your toughest fight when you’re fighting breast cancer?
Breast cancer takes away so much from a woman. And it takes it by force – you either do the treatments, or you die from the disease. That isn’t much of a choice.
Breast cancer steals your health. Your vitality. Your sexuality. Your hair, your eyebrows, and your breasts. Your physical, mental, emotional, and financial resources. It can and does ruin your personal relationships as well. Friends and sometimes even family members fall away as you morph into someone new, someone sick and weak, someone ruined and desperate. Contemplation of your mortality is more than many people can bear. But you must bear it, alone. You have no choice.
You can recover some of these things, but not all of them. The truth is, you will never be the same again.
The only real matter of choice in the whole nightmare is the reconstruction decision. It’s the only component of breast cancer treatment where the patient’s feelings, opinions, AGENCY, affect the actual experience. To snatch this away is the height of cruelty.
It’s dehumanizing. It’s unethical. It’s wrong.
No one knows why some surgeons cross this line. So far, the vast majority of surgeons and hospitals won’t even admit that it happens at all.
I’m here to tell you. IT HAPPENED TO ME. It continues to happen every day, as we speak. And it will keep happening again, and again, until we fight back.
Join me on September 8th to add your voice to the growing chorus that says, “NO MORE” to this cruelty.
It happened to me and I can’t change that… but I DO NOT have to accept it. I WILL fight back. I WILL do whatever it takes to put a stop to it. To protect women. To protect our daughters.
Join me.
Kim Bowles
Not Putting on a Shirt