Pink Perspectives

Every year is dedicated to an awareness campaign for breast cancer prevention and treatment. The disease has been rampant in the West but steadily has taken up many lives in Pakistan as well.

Many women have to face the overwhelming shock of breast cancer diagnosis, especially when it emerges suddenly, one fine day. They are bombarded with new information, flooded with emotions about loved ones, and many a time, worried about the financial implications it brings.

Let us take the opportunity to honour all those who lost their lives to the horrid breast cancer, celebrate the courageous survivors, and stand strongly for the current patients. Let us keep the upright medical practitioners in integrity as they hold their backs, every day.

During the month of October, we reboot and reconfigure ourselves to support families and patients to give them easy access to care, and more importantly, increase awareness of the life-saving significance of early screening.

Fortunately, the world is progressing in its war against cancer. The research and screening technologies have improved. Groundbreaking therapies and transformative treatments have also bought more time for cancer patients.

Pakistan still has a long way to go. We need easy access to these treatments. We need to drive breakthroughs in preventing, detecting, and treating diseases like cancer. What we need is a game-changing goal that will cut the death rate by half in the next 30 years. Pakistan needs to accelerate its research and development. We must work towards ensuring clinical trials that reflect inclusivity and do not treat only those who can afford it. We need to have more therapists, and therapies to sustain, if not improve, the quality of the patient’s life.

A cancer diagnosis is not only physically and mentally frightening but it also paves the way for the scary and worrisome world of endless appointments, exorbitant costs, and immense care. Cancer can rip people and their families apart. And it can be emotionally draining for a patient as well as the family. The feeling of helplessness and desperation, combined with Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD), can be stressful events. The mind, spirit, and emotions take on a life of their own as the patient and family go through denial, anger, depression, and acceptance of the disease. Although the treatment targets the disease, it doesn’t leave any of this untouched.

This requires early detective techniques and affordable mammograms so that low-income groups do not have to choose between paying rent, buying groceries, or opting for life-saving treatments and care that cancer requires. While all of this will help in containing cancer, and hopefully reduce the death rate, we also must gear our endeavours towards educating girls about its awareness, as well as encouraging women in their families to get early screening.

This drive does not need a day or a month to rededicate ourselves to this cause. It does not need a marathon or one-day sloganeering. What we really need are funds for treatment, competent doctors, research grants, and early detection programmes. We need support groups for survivors and we need everyone to join hands for all the lives we have lost and for all those that we can save – citizens, government, private businesses, corporate giants, NGOs, and hospitals to come together on a single page with a common goal – save lives!