We have moved!

Hi there everyone,  I have moved my blog to joysthoughts.com

I hope you will join us there!

Thanks,

Joy

One Resignation is not Enough: How will Komen Make Amends?

This has been quite a week.  Nancy Brinker and the Susan G. Komen Foundation showed their true colors this week.  First they resolved that Planned Parenthood was no longer eligible to apply for their grants because they were under investigation by a member of the House of Representatives.  They immediately saw the power of the women's rights movement, and it convinced them to apologize and kind of sort of take it back.  But that was not enough.  The American Public was still angry about the attack on women's rights, Komen needed to make amends. And now today, we awake to the resignation of Karen Handel, their relatively new appointed Senior Vice President for Public Policy.  And I say...Karen is their scapegoat.  Who could forget Andrea Mitchell's interview with Nancy Brinker last week where she said:

BRINKER: Well, let me just for the record tell you, Karen did not have anything to do with this decision.  This was decided at the board level and also by our mission, 

If that is true, then Karen's resignation is not enough!

Komen has been influenced by politicians since day one.  Brinker built SGK for the cure by using those republican connections and she, herself, was appointed to Bush's staff.  They showed their true colors last week and those are painted by the Board of Directors of the Organization.  Board members, Nancy Brinker and John Rafaelli assured the public that the decision was a board decision, not influenced by Handel.  Shouldn't be held accountable for the decision to hire people like Karen Handel and for their criteria in evaluating funding recipients?    Will they hold their sponsors to similar criteria?

I will continue to support worthy breast cancer organizations like the one I co-founded, The Young Survival Coalition and the only one that has set a deadline to end breast cancer, The National Breast Cancer Coalition.

Mammography Screening: Is it worth the harms?

Is it all it is sold to us as?  When I was diagnosed with breast cancer 17 years ago, my cancer was not found by screening mammography.  I found it with Accidental Breast Exam.  I rolled over in bed and felt something that did not belong in my body and after a few weeks, it was diagnosed as breast cancer.  Many women are diagnosed today with screening mammography because the media does such a good job of touting the expression, "Early Detection Saves Lives, Get Your Annual Mammogram!"  The masses have heard the message and few question the science behind it.  The National Breast Cancer Coalition educated me in 1999 and so I began to understand the true issues.  Mammography is not prevention.  Mammography is designed to find abnormal and cancerous cells which may or may not be dangerous.  Once you are diagnosed with a pre cancerous or cancerous condition, you will be treated regardless of the degree of danger your condition presents. And now, a researcher, Peter Gotsche, Director of the Independent Nordic Cochrane Collaboration, has published a book pointing to his research from more than a decade which clearly indicates that breast cancer screening in healthy populations creates more harmful results than helpful ones.  Thank you Dr. Gotsche for being brave enough to try to reveal reasons why we need to question all the assumptions made about breast cancer screening, mammography and early detection.  Your book is needed.

For the past 17 years, I have heard people say so many crazy things:

"Mammogram saved my life", and my response to this is..."I hope you live long and healthy and prosper, but you cannot say that mammogram saved your life until you know that you did not die of breast cancer or from any of the side effects that cancer treatment causes."

"If Mammogram saves one life, then it is worth it", and my response is... "Was it worth the 10 women who were harmed by the side effects to cancer treatment, what about the 2 women who died of complications from treatment?" How is one life worth more than the negative affects caused to exponentially more women?

Few are brave enough to talk to others and make them more aware of the real facts.  The National Breast Cancer Coalition is and you can learn more about them by visiting: 

Breast Cancer Deadline 2020

While you are there, sign the petition to the President asking for everyone to help us to end this disease.  Check out the 2011 Advocacy Summit where you can learn all the facts about breast cancer and better understand how we accomplish our mission.  Get your face on the clock and help support the movement to end the disease.

We need everyone and that means you!  Are you with us?

Breast Cancer Deadline 2020

Breast Cancer Deadline 2020

I am a 17 year breast cancer survivor who has seen the wide variety of horror this disease creates.  I have lost so many friends and each loss was hard on me, but so much harder on their loving families.  So many of my friends were young when they died of breast cancer.  Some of them died when breast cancer spread to other organs and some of them died as a result of the treatment from breast cancer.  As an Advocate who has been a voice for young women with breast cancer I have learned that most of the issues surrounding breast cancer are complex.  However, after 17 years, I can simply say the following.  We need to end breast cancer.  We need to focus all of our resources on preventing the disease in the first place and preventing the spread of the disease to important organs in the body.  We need an answer and we needed it soon.  We need to all support the one organization who is asking us to do this, The National Breast Cancer Coalition. 

I have been a board member of The Young Survival Coalition (YSC) since we began it in 1998.  The YSC has sat on the Board of Directors of The National Breast Cancer Coalition since 2001 because we recognize that breast cancer must end and we must all go out of business!

We all think of breast cancer as a disease that affects older people, but clearly, it affects everyone.  When folks are diagnosed with this disease, it affects everyone who knows them.  That means everyone!  Everyone (yes that is you) can add their signatures to the petition to the president of the United States.  He needs to embrace the need to end this disease.  Please sign the petition!

And everyone can add their incredible voices to the chorus singing for the end of breast cancer by joining us at the Advocacy Summit on May 5th -8th; Scholarships are available! 

I hope to see you all there!

Blog and Blog Often...

I love to write.  I could really write all day long but the best writing is the stuff I do in the morning.  My problem is I get interrupted.  I can't seem to have a complete thought long enough and I don't dare block out all my interruptions.  Children will remember that sort of thing and my husband, the extraordinary multi-tasker, capable of having six thoughts at once just cannot understand my need to focus on what I write.  I can't help but see all the household chores while I am writing.  I keep a pad next to me to note these as I write, so I don't stop writing to complete them.  But how I wish that writing it down, got it done.  If only my fictitious housekeeper, Julie would vaporize and serve.

Then there are the technological challenges.  I started to blog once last year.  I set it up at this URL:
http://datenightinnewjersey.blogspot.com/  But yesterday when I wanted to add to that blog, I forgot how to access it and so I started a whole new blog.  Today I awoke with a light bulb and was able to find the old blog at the above link and then I spent the best creative hours trying to figure out how to merge the blogs only to find more technological challenges.  I suppose I could contact someone at Blogger.com and figure it out, or I could just leave that one there and continue to blog about date nights on that one (of course that means my husband and I would have to have some date nights).   And I could use this site for all my other random thoughts.  So everything in my world would break down into two categories:  date nights and thoughts about everything that have nothing to do with date nights.  And now my challenge is that I have sacrificed all the best creative hours (I'm a morning writer) to trying to rise to the technology challenges and my creative juices are so dry that I can only think to write about how I wish to write and write often.  I pause here to gather my thoughts and do you know what comes to mind?  "The washer is done, better move the stuff to the dryer." And that brings us back to the interruptions described above. Jotted it down...and I now feel that my creative juices are gone.

I tell you...this blog and blog often thing is going to be difficult but I am determined to rise above it and write regularly about important issues. 

Some of those issues will include my thoughts on Healthcare, Breast Cancer Advocacy Issues, Raising Incredible Children and Managing A Household.  Politics could come up here.  Challenges I experience regularly will be discussed.  Stay tuned!

Call of Duty, Modern Warfare. Is it a Game or a Plot?

As a parent, I never planned to need to educate myself about video games, specifically Call of Duty, Modern Warfare.  Admittedly, I don’t understand much about this game.  I tried to play it once or twice with my son, but ended up bleeding more than anything else.  It was not fun for me.  But I gave him the benefit of the doubt because my son finds lots of things enjoyable that I have no desire to do (snowboarding, guitar playing, engineering robotic arms, sling shots, catapults and other creative things) and I thought this was just another one of those activities.  However,  this is a game where the objective is to kill others (dressed as soldiers) over and over again.  If you have the Xbox live connection, you can kill other people in the comfort of their own homes.  If you are playing with older people in the live community, you might come across someone who makes their character squat up and down over a dead body.  Imagine my shock when my 10 year old taught us what this practice actually is?  He told us it was “tea bagging and it’s sort of inappropriate, Mom”.  This, of course, prompted more research.  My husband and I  began with Wickipedia ...and then on to find this video:

The Lyrics in this video have a very graphic and gross way of laughing at the characters quest for domination. 

On the gamespot bulletin board someone asks the question what is teabagging in CODMW4? 

And one person responds:

“When one kills the remaining players in search and destroy after they plant the bomb, one must establish one's dominance over the enemy team by rubbing one's balls in their faces, then proceed to defuse the bomb. Haven't you read the COD4 manual? It's all in there. “

Another person posts…"it’s on page 12 of the manual."

After we did our research, we talked to our son and explained that it was a rude act of domination.  You kill someone, and then make him lick your genitals.  We asked him if he thought that was correct behavior under any circumstances.  He responded appropriately, “no”.  We asked him if he thought men in a real war would have the time to waste doing such things on the battlefield, and he again replied, “no”. 

He asked repeatedly, if we could purchase the newest version of the game until we told him our final answer is no.  I continue to remind him to practice guitar, read books and play outside.

We don’t think that our young innocent children could grow to be aggressive agitators.  We don’t believe it’s possible that they want to dominate others.  It’s simply not what we imagine of our beautiful children, but then they grow up and start to be exposed to these things and they get ideas we never thought possible.  These games are clearly rated "M" for mature audiences and so they are inappropriate for 10 year old boys.  Yet, if one 10 year old boy has it, the rest of them want it too.  In our house we have a new rule, the first time a new game is played, a parent must play it with my son to insure that it is appropriate for a person his age.  This really limits which games my son even asks to buy these days.

Updated: 2/6/11

Just last week my tiny town was in the news because two high school boys held down middle school boys and touched them in an inappropriate way.  I have heard bits and pieces of the story from a few who know those involved and apparently many of the issues I discussed in my blog may have influenced the choices made on that day.  Parent's I beg you to better monitor your child's screen time.  This includes, television, movies, computer and video games.