Cancer: Think pink and reach for the green.

Byline: GUEST VIEWPOINT By Patricia Mees Armstrong For The Register-Guard

Two Octobers past, the editor of this page granted me space to trumpet breast cancer awareness during this annual Think-Pink Month. Well, I'm baaaack! In that interval, 100,000 American women are not. Another 3 million have this disease; a third of them have not been diagnosed. Worldwide, people, including men, die of breast cancer at the rate of one every 90 seconds!

The spirit of cancer patients persists. The day following my remarks in 2004, that spirit tied itself up in Eugene on poles and trees along Sixth Avenue bordered by Pearl and Oak streets. Huge pink ribbons with knock-'em-dead bows had been tied by a local breast coalition. Tickling us pink!

It's hard not to get up close and personal when breast cancer patients and advocates have to keep re-inventing sources of funding to get the message to solons who carry the checkbooks for research. And insurance plans, private as well as Medicare, increasingly find tests and treatments ordered by oncologists to be superfluous, lacking the right billing code. For crying out loud, what code is clearer than cancer?

Meanwhile, back here on the ranch and elsewhere, saints roll up their pink sleeves, continuing to come up with viable support:

Soroptimists sponsor the annual Walk for Life, with funds going directly to local gals short on living expenses while in treatment.

Volunteers such as a California friend of mine, a survivor herself, who gives a day per week to the Community Breast Health Project in Palo Alto. Its mission is to "provide information and support to people touched by breast cancer, in an atmosphere of warmth, sensitivity and understanding."

The annual Race for the Cure sponsored by the Susan G. Komen Foundation, which raises millions for research and services such as free mammograms.

I am sicker now, but I am smarter. I rely more and more on humor to get me through this long, slow slide. What - she says humor? What in the world is funny about having breast cancer?

Humor is familiar to my sisters-under-the-skin who sit together waiting for rounds of chemo or radiation, more scans, transfusions or surgery. Annie tells the radiation techs she is beginning to "glow in the dark," and Wilma swears that intravenous needles will soon find her leaking like a sieve all over. Bald Mabel's grandkids made up a jar of what they dubbed "StayBald," promising "This will shrink your head to fit the hair you've got!"

Often the humor is dark, the comic relief palpable in a kind of communal language. We get teary for its truth, we giggle at its message.

Often we are as salty and irreverent as locker-room jocks. Recently a group at the cancer center roared when I said that my disintegrating spine caused me to walk like "an egret with osteoporosis who's recovering from a botched episiotomy!"

We read obituaries that announce the deceased having "died losing a long battle with breast cancer." No! We want to edit: "She beat down that lousy sucker for a long time, courage to spare!"

Soren Kierkegaard said that "Life can only be understood backwards; but it must be lived forwards." Yes, I'm getting smarter - I've learned that, as is politics, all disease is local, so we need to get smarter by being informed, contributing to the eradication of this wickedly pandemic horror.

Other ways to do pink:

Check out what you buy, which merchants you patronize. The Komen Foundation (www.komen.org or 800-I'm aware) has a "The Power of a Promise" list of local businesses that give a percentage of sales to the foundation.

Buy breast cancer postage stamps.

Don't pose that generic question to friends or family with breast cancer: "Let me know if I can do anything." Many people find it hard to ask for help. Just show up and do something!

If you're diagnosed, bombard your dedicated nurses and doctors with questions if you don't understand something.

Get second, even third, opinions.

Wear the pink ribbon pins.

Think pink, but dig in your pockets for that green stuff.

In these two years I lost friends, Judy and Barbara. They'd smile, I think, if I said that the ultimate side effect of their grueling treatments was death. They'd groan at my black Irish eulogy. But they gave this war on breast cancer all they had. None of us should do less.

Patricia Mees Armstrong writes poetry, short fiction and essays. She recently won first prize in poetry in the Kay Snow Contest sponsored by Willamette Writers. She is currently finishing a novel set in Ireland, where she holds dual citizenship.