PINKTOBER 2021

Project Life is happy to share thoughts from our members. Read this from member Flori Hendron.

The artwork is her own.

It gets me every year

Feels like a gut punch

Here we go--inundated

Breast Cancer **awareness**

Pink News, Pink Ads, Pink Washing

Companies making PINK money

Using OUR Ribbons but not funding

OUR research for a CURE

WE are expected to fund our own cure

with runs and rallies

while Pharma spends our money

on finding more TREATMENTS

Because Treatments Equal Profits

Clinical Trials,

practically impossible to gain access

Especially if you have

Metastatic Breast Cancer

The kind that sticks around

Until it kills you

Clinical Trial Criteria

Carried over from one trial to another

Never a reflection of the actual people

Living with the actual cancer

Clinical trials, Hoop-jumps through fire

Schedules that work for them, not you

Randomized and double-blinded

No one can see straight

How I miss the Mundane World

And my life before those three shitty words:

You Have Cancer

Those words exploded right through me

Hit my family, Hit my friends

The mushroom cloud still darkens my days

My life would’ve been so much easier

If I’d only known that I would survive for 24 years!

But that’s not how cancer works.

You get three months at a time.

Scan to Scan. Check up to Check up

I’ve learned to live in

This is the Day I Am Given

Often scared when making plans

Always wondering

Will I be here to see milestones?

And here we go-Pinktober again

Raising our own funds

Moving the needle through

Unpaid Advocacy Work

Hash-tagging each other to death

Watching our friends die

And wondering if we’ll be next

A vaccine for COVID

But for Breast Cancer

Still NO CURE!

Pinktober © Flori Hendron 2021