I have watched this promo for your FFANY shoe sale for a month now, cringing every time. I know I'll take some heat for saying this, but as a breast cancer survivor, I find it offensive. Yes, I am supportive of your efforts to help the cause....and yes, I appreciate your contribution to research and awareness. It's just the ad itself that is the problem. Ms, Burke, a lovely woman, cheerily dances around the stage, proclaiming that fighting breast cancer is as easy as dancing.
Let me start by admitting, right up front, that I think I did pretty well throughout my illness. Better than many....possibly better than most. But it was still far from easy. The initial diagnosis was a shock. Then there were many days of uncertainty, not knowing yet how bad it was. Was it stage one? Two? The dreaded stage four? Would I live long enough that my small, precious grandchildren would be able to remember me?
I went through the biopsy--a long needle inserted into breast in several different spots.....then more days of waiting for results. I had two mastectomies. I had a lymp node disection that left me without feeling in my fiingers and without the use of my thumb for over a year. I had a port surgically inserted so that I could receive chemotherapy.
For weeks, I had poisonous chemicals poored into my body to fight the disease. I got sick. I lost my hair. I lost my energy, my sex drive and was thrown into early menopause. For nearly three years afterward, I suffered night sweats, bones that ached so badly I couldn't sleep.....and constant exhaustion.
I went through the excrutiatingly painful process of reconstruction so that I could feel better about the way I looked (Yay--more needles!)
Then five years of taking a pill everyday (more side effects, sigh), to retard my chances of a recurrance. Every six months checking in with my oncologist, having bone scans and hoping....praying....that things are still good.
Like I said, I think I got off easier than many. QVC, do you really think fighting breast cancer is "easy"? Tell that to my friend Ashley. She was diagnosed at age 24 and had to have a double mastectomy. She has fought as hard as she can and now, at age 28, it's back. Stage four. She will never get better, but can only hope to live long enough to see her children into their teens.
Or tell it to my friend Teresa, who is also stage four and who will have to have chemotherapy for the rest of her life.
Or my friend Linda, who had to be pushed down the aisle in a wheelchair at her daughter's wedding.....and who passed away the following week.
There is nothing easy about fighting breast cancer. Thank you, truly, for your generous contributions. But please be more sensitive when planning next year's campaign.
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