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.