It's heartbreaking news.
I'm sorry for the fear and powerlessness that Jennifer must be feeling. Because she is family to you, my brother, and because people I love are precisely walking in Jennifer's shoes.
And the subject ignites for me a rekindled anger at a very important element of this big picture, most often overlooked by all of us who are effected by the love and loss of friends and family to all kinds of cancer, but as you say, especially breast cancer.
I would Love to see ALL of the women effected by this reality turn their focus to include accountability of research organizations: to act as if every financial resource dedicated to research is a life and death question of management.
Perhaps I'm naïve in my expectation that research funds for finding cures of breast cancer be funnelled toward scientific progress - in every dollar and cent.
I've read some really disturbing portrayals of the Susan B. Komen organization, i.e. their copyright of the color pink in reference to cancer, the huge budget for defending that copyright, the enormous budget and salaries for marketing, executive salaries on par with private corporations, unflinching budgets for luxury office spaces, etc.
I wish that cancer research was research for cancer.
I don't doubt the likelihood that I must someday face the reality of a diagnosis, and the cascade of emotions that must certainly follow.
Like we experienced when we worked as activist fundraisers, there must be a radical shift in the paradigm of organizations' structures in order for those organizations to go on requesting and dispensing precious funding, year after year, decade after decade.
You've raised an important and timely concern around congressional allocation.
I wish that people affected by cancer would organize their passions and the compassion that all of us feel around these points that I'm raising. If that happened, I believe that the organizations involved would respond, and the outcome would have an equal or possibly greater effect on hastening the progress toward a cure.
