Last week I refilled my prescription for warfarin, a blood thinner I take for my cancer-related pulmonary embolism (such blood clots that are not uncommon in cancer patients). The Fred Meyer pharmacy did their usual efficient job and delivered my medication promptly. It looked like this:
I think it’s wonderful when corporations support cancer research and cancer patients. Kroger (Fred Meyer’s parent company) has a large breast cancer awareness campaign featuring Kroger employees who have or had the disease, and I’m sure some breast cancer patients who received this pill bottle cap felt a surge of hope.
“Hope” is not the emotion I felt when I saw this bottle.
I felt stigmatized. Ignored. Devalued. And these feeling were triggered by an organizaion supposedly aiming to make me feel BETTER.
I have lung cancer, the biggest cancer killer, a disease that kills twice as many women as breast cancer … READ MORE
Image credit: 
Pink-ribbon pill bottle cap by Janet Freeman-Daily is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.
Gray Connections 
Thank you for voicing what I feel pretty much every time I see a pink ribbon (and to think pink used to be one of my favorite colors). Having battled lung cancer myself for over nine years, I’ve expressed my dismay about the pinkwashing of October. Recently, a “friend” of mine responded to one of these posts, telling me to “let it go”. Yep…he went there. Until someone has walked this path, I do not believe they get the right to tell me to let it go. Just sayin…
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A couple of Octobers ago I complained to the cancer center at which I was treated because they only had a pink spotlight shining on the building in Oct–where had the teal light been the previous month, for example. I don’t know if any patients with other cancers raised the issue–and I’m sure part of the reason no one bothered to get back to me was because I was a breast cancer patient–how ungrateful of me to point this out. I wrote a post about it back then, and here is what I said: “I do not understand the need for breast cancer awareness…at a cancer center, for crying out loud. A building that exists as a place to treat cancer patients is the epitome of all cancer awareness. Thus, a pink light becomes overkill, a pink light becomes the favoring of patients with breast cancer—their lives? their money?—over all other cancer patients, a pink light becomes the shoving of a cause down many gagging throats.”
I am no longer a patient there; I had to get a new oncologist due to insurance changes in 2014.
It is a fine line to walk–should I speak up for patients with other cancers–because as Kimberly says here, I have not walked those paths. I only know divisive ribbon colors are, and I am sick of all of it. But then–I can complain about nearly everything in cancer culture, as a Cancer Curmudgeon.
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Thank you for this post. And this one, too.
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