A few years back, one of my two closest friends in the world learned he had cancer.
He didn’t have a particularly high-paying job and he didn’t have good benefits. Indeed, he told me if it hadn’t been for the Affordable Care Act, also known as Obamacare, he would be dead.
That probably wasn’t an exaggeration. I remember reading Jonathan Cohn’s wonderful book “Sick” about our health-care system in the early years of this century. Cohn said there was one main factor that determined whether someone would survive cancer.
Guess what it is.
It’s whether or not they have health insurance.
For the most part, if you don’t have insurance, you’re basically dead.
As best as I can figure, I have known six people who have had cancer. Three of them are dead now, although only one of them died of cancer. Two survived their cancers and basically died of old age.
Of the three still alive, two have survived breast cancer. One is in her late 70s and the other will be 64 in two weeks.
The other is, of course, the friend I mentioned earlier. He’ll turn 70 later this year.
There are some fatal diseases for which people don’t have a great deal of sympathy. They say the victims brought it on themselves through bad choices, but my brother-in-law who died of liver cancer didn’t make bad choices, nor did my surviving friend who had throat cancer.
And I certainly don’t think the 264,000 American women a year who are diagnosed with breast cancer did anything to bring it on themselves.
It might surprise you to learn that 2,400 American men a year are also diagnosed with breast cancer. That’s not a large number, although the rarity of it is no consolation to the 500 men a year who die of it.
Still, curing breast cancer is a goal that has awakened millions of women. The Susan G. Komen organization is one of the charities my wife and I support and will continue to support. I have three sisters, a daughter and a daughter-in-law who I pray will never get breast cancer and I have two lovely granddaughters who I hope will live most of their adult lives in a world where breast cancer has been cured.
The color pink has become the symbol of the fight to cure breast cancer, and in 2020 Dolly Parton and other singers performed a song suggesting that maybe one day, pink won’t have to symbolize cancer.
Someday, they sang, pink will be just another color.
God willing.
I hope I live long enough to see it.