Emily Wade

The blood draining from the bandages where my mom’s breasts used to be was vermilion, not pale pink.  Neither were the pill bottles, paper measuring cups, or plastic buckets I arranged in rows around her following her double mastectomy.

When we think of breast cancer, we don’t think of it in shades of red, brown, and sterile white.  We think of joyful blush-colored ribbons.  Particularly during ‘Pinktober’ we are bombarded with ribbons pinned on jackets and splashed across car bumpers.  Pink ribbons even danced their way across the felt blanket my mom used to cover herself after her surgery.  Despite the warmth of these images, they are most effective in their ability to hide the experiences of breast cancer patients and survivors.  Just as my mom’s blanket covered up her drains and bandages when friends came to visit her, contemporary breast cancer awareness campaigns and their critics conceal the heart wrenching realities of this disease.

Society expects female breast cancer patients to hide their pain from those around them.  According to social scientist Sue Wilkinson, women must do this so that their pain does not interrupt others’ conception of the women they love as brave and infallible. According to Wilkinson’s view, it is too much for us to conceive of the women in our lives as needing care when we expect them to care for us.

Due to this dissonance, society expects female breast cancer patients to continue to fulfill their societal duty as gleeful, selfless ...