I and J are combined for injustice. It’s been a hard day. A strong and highly intelligent woman who was a friend of mine died today of metastatic breast cancer. To paraphrase my friend Meg, she didn’t lose a battle. Cancer treatment failed her. She tried everything. Her lungs were full of tumor. After she tried everything and found nothing that would work, she accepted the care of hospice and she died. Another friend discovered that her platelets were low because she now has developed leukemia from chemo treatments 10 years ago. Cancer treatment has failed her as well. Many treatments for breast cancer have been in use for decades with little change and great risks. These are injustices. Where is the research and innovation that we need? Once, in the 90’s, a researcher published falsified evidence that breast cancer could be cured with bone marrow transplants. Thousands of women were tortured and died of this false treatment before he was discovered to be a charlatan. This was an injustice. Here is another injustice: “Compared with white women, black women had lower rates of getting breast cancer (incidence rates) and higher rates of dying from breast cancer (death rates) between 1999 and 2013. Deaths from breast cancer are going down among both black and white women, especially among younger black women. But breast cancer death rates are 40% higher among black women than white women.” Health care disparities are an injustice. Everybody dies, of course. But my sisters lives are cut short, as mine will be, by this terrible disease. We are not breasts. We are women and we want to live.
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