www.breastcancervision.com/sites/default/files/review-mbc/decade_report_full_report_final.pdf

This is well worth your time to skim or even fully immerse yourself in, and I’d say is still relevant as far as attitudes and education go. Especially of advocacy.

I’m feeling sad this week as I should have been in Philadelphia with the Living Beyond Breast Cancer 2020 conference getting trained up and becoming one of the honored selectees to represent and act on behalf of the people who need it most – the patients. And become another voice to deliver the messages where they’re most needed. I’m really down because we couldn’t get a real story from our government to stave off a crisis. We were lied to. Cheated. Made vulnerable.

And I’ve not wanted to ever hear – don’t mention you’re terminal illness if you wind up in the hospital with the virus. You may not get a test or even a ventilator because you’re dying anyway. What if someone more valuable or worthy arrives?

Here’s a poem for you and my tears track around it like the little girl just learning that life means death. I hardly need to explain this to anyone reading. I love you all.

Erasure

Sad, long shadow-colored faces stare out from my past,

As time sits in my lap like any child.

Her wheaten braids, long

Punctuated by red ribbon,

With hands worried raw

Her eyes like a glass doll’s,

Wise with false memory

From fables and lies.

Comforting her with

Neverlands and evermores

I name her Tomorrow —

Yesterday’s taken.

Somewhere a darkened classroom with every wall covered

In blackboards time waits for me.

Wispy white chalk ghosts pinned by a futile hand

Tonight’s erasers coughed up puffs of smoke

Clean them free of my numbers and your letters as

I add them together.

Can I call upon anyone to raise their hand

For the answer is sometimes so clear

But the corrections

The incorrections.

Out in the yard I saw the remaining clouds,

Silver shivering unlined,

Too light to stay and easily blown away

At once leaving only light

Filtered into my pin pupil eyes.

And I without warning and against advice –

I stare into the sun.

Overcome by warmth in my extremities

From over the hills a white flutter appears.

It’s not a bird, the cloudless sky does oblige

Without wind. What fell at my feet:

I lifted up a note to: me. Please return

To: Eternally. He asks for a promise:

Now, here, you and only you

May love capture, like a photograph only

Just enough for talking too much to laugh.

What’s eternity’s address

The letter remains in my pocket

And waits for me to join

The rest in time and peace of mind.