73 Public Speaking, Friends Diagnosed

May 2009 brought several changes. One was a another job change. The new job in January was a contract position. The people were nice and the company wanted to hire me permanently, but I just didn't enjoy the work.

On the same day my grandfather died, I received the formal job offer for a dream job. I gave my notice, fulfilled it, then went to work for the dream company in May. I get to work as a data analyst now and I love it. I'm crunching numbers and building reports and databases. I'm expanding my Excel and Visio skills and getting to teach others to do the same. It's great!

In May I learned that one of my girlfriends had been diagnosed with breast cancer. It felt like a blow to the gut to learn about that. Like me, she's a 30-something woman with a husband, a full time job, and a young child. Thanks to the Pink Ribbon Cowgirls, I have many friends now who are breast cancer survivors. This was the first of my friends with breast cancer who had been a friend before her diagnosis. It doesn't make sense for me to take her diagnosis personally, but there was a part of me mentally shaking a fist at breast cancer while yelling, "Leave my friends alone!"

The longer I'm alive, the less cancer is "somebody else's problem." It keeps resurfacing among people I know.

In June we lost our very first Pink Ribbon Cowgirl to breast cancer. The news depressed me for two days. In my head, I knew it was bound to happen sooner or later. Statistically, if you make friends with a group of people who have been diagnosed with cancer, sooner or later one of them is going to pass away. She died on June 11th, and many of the Cowgirls gathered at a member's house to grieve and remember. She was one of us, and it rattled us on several levels. We spoke of her and remembered her. We swapped stories of diagnosis and treatments (since many of us hadn't met each other before), and the mastectomy girls raised their shirts and compared their doctors' work. (Mastectomy survivors do that sometimes when they gather in groups. It's something a little foreign to us lumpectomy girls.) It was an interesting evening.

We celebrated the life of our sister survivor, a single parent, and mourned the increased difficulties of her 14-year-old son having to go on without his mother. I was asked to say a few words at her memorial on behalf of the Pink Ribbon Cowgirls, and so I found myself for the second time in two months speaking the praises of a life lost to breast cancer.

At the get together for our lost Cowgirl, I got to meet Michelle Bynum, a powerhouse of a personality whom I liked right away. She lives in Georgetown, so it isn't often that I see her at Austin-based events. I met some of the people in her group in November 2006 when I did the Race for the Cure. Her supporters wore t-shirts that said "Michelle's Angels" and they had a mission to educate people that young women can and do get breast cancer. Having heard about this woman in 2006, when she had already raised tens of thousands of dollors for the Komen foundation, it was something of a shock and a delight to put a name and a face together when I met her at my friend's house.

Michelle's doctor dismissed her lump as something non-cancerous without even testing it or suggesting that she see a specialist. The two-year delay between concern and diagnosis cost her precious time, and she was Stage III when she was finally diagnosed. She went through treatment and into remission, and then her cancer came back as Stage IV. Now she's the guest chair for the 2009 Race for a Cure for the Austin Komen fund raiser and I think she's an inspiration. She wants very much for women to be their own advocates, and to have the strength to keep asking questions whenever something in their bodies doesn't feel right. I agree with her. If you ask a doctor to investigate something odd and the doctor just poo-poos you, then go to a different doctor.

In July I gave a training in Excel for a group of property management people. This seems to be my year for public speaking. To my credit, I've come a long way with respect to my training style and pacing. I got off to a rocky start by spending too much time on navigation shortcuts, but then got into the "interesting" stuff and held their interest to the end. That was gratifying.

Now it's August and another of my friends has been diagnosed with breast cancer. (Because the medical details of my friends' lives are private, I've decided not to give names or details in a forum as public as a blog. So I'm not going to mention their stages or treatments here. Michelle's story is already public knowledge so I felt that repeating it here might serve to reach someone who needed to know.) My reaction to my second friend's diagnosis was less wrenching than my first friend. Maybe I'm getting conditioned to it.

I'm up for a 3-5 minute speech in September during the program portion of the Champagne Brunch and Silent Auction that benefits the Breast Cancer Resource Center. I'm looking forward to that. I've been working on my speech for weeks now and still have a ways to go before it's at a point that won't embarrass me to share it.

Rue McClanahan will be our guest speaker at the Brunch this year. I'm really looking forward to hearing her speech, and more than a little excited to know I'll be on the same stage even though not at the same time.

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