PLEASE DO NOT FEED THE DUCKS.

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(via mallorylucille)

Source: dillonhilton

2013-05-14

how my weekends work.

(via c0gnitive-dissonance)

Source:

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I must be a mermaid, Rango…

(via c0gnitive-dissonance)

Source: buttclapping

In a few weeks, I’ll be back on the slicing table. Breasts and belly and thighs pressed up against an all too familiar metal-cold, but I won’t really feel it because I’ll be asleep. I also won’t feel the knife slice into my back, and I won’t feel them slice off the benign tumors lining my spine. I will wake up somehow changed. Something of me removed, and then stitched up. I don’t know how to comment on Angelina Jolie’s recent New York Times article. I don’t know if I even want to begin talking about Jolie’s assertion that there are “options” because being aware of “options” doesn’t make them a reality. I think a lot about what it means to raise awareness, and I don’t doubt it’s importance. I am skeptical, however, of exactly how Jolie’s awareness campaign functions for the average New York Times reader and how it functions for everyone outside of that bracket.

What I do know is that I was diagnosed with breast cancer when (after eighteen years of being uninsured) I was finally granted access to student health insurance, which was paid for by the Higher Education Opportunity Program (HEOP) at NYU. Even with this insurance, a “preventative double mastectomy” was impossible. When insurance companies hear the word “preventative”, they understand it to be “optional” and optional quickly comes to mean “cosmetic”. And this means, they aren’t going to cover it. In fact, unless you are at a later stage of breast cancer, it is still often considered preventative (i.e. when I was stage I, I considered this but was told that it would be optional and therefore, I would have to cover most of the expenses. I now am stage IV).

I am writing this after two rounds of chemo, a round of radiation, several drug therapies, a blood transfusion, and countless doctors appointments. Over $90,000 of debt. And I’m insured.

What maybe frustrates me more than Jolie’s call for arms, is her following statement: “I feel empowered that I made a strong choice that in no way diminishes my femininity.” I’m frustrated with the way prosthetics function to keep intact her “femininity” that could seemingly be diminished by something like surgery. I’m frustrated with where our money (Susan G. Komen, American Cancer Society, etc.) is going: not to finding any kind of cure, but for advancements in breast surgery so that, as Jolie puts it, we are left with “small scars and that’s it”. She can be “just Mommy, the same as she always was”.

I want to quote Lorde here because it’s fitting and because she has written about this far more eloquently and powerfully than I ever will:

“Prosthesis offers the empty comfort of ‘Nobody will know the difference.’ But it is that very difference which I wish to affirm, because I have lived it, and survived it, and wish to share that strength with other women. If we are to translate the silence surrounding breast cancer into language and action against this scourge, then the first step is that women with mastectomies must become visible to each other.”