Barbara Mojonnier, doing her weekly volunteer work at the hospital, pushed her book cart into a room and was surprised to find an acquaintance from her church. “What are you doing here–malingering?” she asked cheerfully. “Oh, I’ve just had a mastectomy,” came the response. It was typical of Kim: she never told many people when she was going to the hospital, and she never made a big deal about her treatments.
“It’s a real slice of life in the waiting room,” Thomphsen reported, “all these women in varying stages of cancer. There are some with brain tumors, who are ready to check out. It’s hard–it could be you in five years.”
The treatments for breast cancer have not appreciably changed in the last decades: they still consist primarily of “slash, burn, and poison,” as one breast cancer activist puts it: removing cancerous tissue, using radiation to attempt to kill cancer, and using chemicals.
Although breast cancer is still most common in postmenopausal women, it is a much more virulent disease with a much lower survival rate when it turns up in younger women, says Joann Schellenbach of the American Cancer Society’s New York media office. “Breast cancer is now the number-one diagnosed cancer in the country. It’s overshot lung cancer, which affects both men and women. When you consider that, really, only women get breast cancer, that’s a lot of cancers.” With the aging of the baby boomer generation, Schellenbach anticipates that breast cancer rates will continue to rise.
Where she hasn’t seen much change is in the treatment of breast cancer, or in the importance given research. “In 1989, there were 150,000 new cases. For 1991, the figure is 175,000. They don’t know what’s causing it. The survival rate has been the same for 60 years. Today’s treatments are prolonging lives, but not necessarily saving lives over the long term. There’s an emphasis on mammography now, and that’s good, but mammography is not prevention–mammography is detection.”
Harte has seen the tone of the discussion change in the time she’s been involved with Y-ME. “It used to be, “We don’t want to talk about death.’ That changed in March or April. In the last year or so, it’s like the momentum has really increased. Women are angry.”
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“I’ve had a full life; I’ve seen my children grow up. I don’t have grandchildren, but I’ve made my peace. My fear is that in the next ten years my daughter will develop breast cancer.” Because of the family history, she took her daughter to see a surgeon “when she was 29, to investigate the possibility of a prophylactic mastectomy. The surgeon said she had a 30 to 40 percent risk factor–‘but life is a risk, you take a risk driving home.’ I told him, ‘If I thought my chances of getting killed on the way home were 40 percent, I wouldn’t drive.’” Harte sees the surgeon’s remark as indicative of a pervasive sexism: “I think that because they have this mindset of what the breast represents to men, to women, to children in our society, men cannot give women good advice about their breasts.”
