I'm venturing into dangerous territory: I am not writing a sappy story about breast cancer survival. In fact, I am doing the opposite, for the mental and physical health of breast cancer survivors everywhere. I am calling for a hiatus on the fear-mongering and sympathy. If I were making the rules for media, I would allow only breast cancer stories about achievements, health research results, and medical breakthroughs. There. I feel better already.

After a month-long campaign about breast cancer, the benefits and the television coverage just won't stop. Tonight, a celebrity breast cancer survivor was promoting a Thanksgiving t.v. show with childhood cancer survivors in a chorus, and ice skating featuring celebrity survivors. Can't we give the breast cancer story a break? As a Stage III breast cancer survivor, I should be able to critique the media, commercial, medical, and non-profit obsession with what used to be mentioned only with hushed voices among women. But, bring on the barbs. The price is worth it. Today's media campaign about breast cancer is harmful in enough ways that the debates and evidence would fill a flash drive. Here's  a handful of issues:

• Screening and prevention are often coupled, as if they were the same or related. Prevention is NOT equivalent is any way to screening. Women I meet often equate the two, as if the regular mammograms have some preventive benefit, when cancer is detected in an early stage.
• Regular mammograms do not improve health; they can harm health with high doses of radiation. In fact, the FDA has now, based on scientific studies, changed its recommendations about the age at which regular mammograms should begin for women at high risk. That age is fully 15 years later than it was when I had my first one.
• $2.00 and up pink paraphernalia do not help find a cure. The "search for a cure," if it ever began in earnest, hasn't yielded one, despite then-President Nixon's declaration of war on cancer four decades and billions of dollars ago. Take note that the expression "search for a cure"implies that cancer is hopelessly unpreventable. The reality is that lifestyle factors and toxins do have an effect, but sweeping changes in consumer behavior would have disruptive effects on the economy. Medical and health writers are therefore fed information that prevents something, but it's not cancer: it prevents consumers or patients from learning quickly and easily about how to control their own health and reduce the probability of cancer in their lifetime.
• Cancer benefits, races, walks, television commercials achieve their monetary goals through accentuating victims, and rousing strong emotions of sympathy, pity, and guilt. [There are some exceptions.] If you don't believe me, then next time suggest to the Pink-whatever fundraiser that no survivors or survivor stories should be included - only the fund-raising goals, achievements, uses of the funds, and benefits of those uses. How much support would that idea garner? High emotion is the unmentionable fundraising mechanism that everyone understands. While some benefits do emphasize survivors' achievements, too often the survivors-as-smiling-living-victims are trotted out to accentuate the need for additional funding.

Not long after I was diagnosed with cancer, a friend brought me the Lance Armstrong book, It's Not About the Bike. It was an inspiration: its pages revealed the triumph of an indomitable human spirit. Armstrong would not be the man or athlete he is today without his cancer experience. How I wanted to succeed like he did! As I finished the last of the epilogues, I made the decision to concentrate on overcoming and triumphing, as if I were negotiating rapids, climbing mountains, and running a marathon obstacle course with a 50-lb knapsack and stress fractures. Even though I now question the benefit of my specific protocol (hindsight is always 20/20), I value that terrible and terrifying experience because it proved that I am strong.

Cancer happens. Whether any one person could have prevented it matters not when the diagnosis is pronounced. Treatment is an obstacle course; when complete, it's time for a victory lap, not constant reminders in media about what we have just lived through and the fear-inducing reminders about risk. Survivors can become trapped in a web that's difficult to extricate oneself from. An insidious thought process can take over: if people have sympathy for me, shouldn't I feel sorry for myself? If they focus on how weak I am after treatment, then I must be weak. It can be good to be weak - look at all the attention I'm receiving!

Cancer happens. We -- survivors and people who don' have it-- don't need endless reminders about it. This penetration of cancer awareness into our daily psyches can engender fear and therefore ill health. A focus on achieving health and strength can be self-fulfilling and it's a more positive frame of reference.

If there is only one message that you take away from this reading, let it be this: empower yourself by refusing to be a victim, which means also that you refrain from unquestioning acceptance of the breast cancer awareness message.