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Pink Aid Gets Boost From Moonjumpers
The Moonjumpers Charitable Foundation, Inc. recently hosted a fundraiser for Pink Aid at Del Vino Vineyards in Northport. The More than two hundred Moonjumpers supporters and sponsors were out in full force because they know that we know how to throw a party for a good cause. The event included a live special performance from Broadway Star, Adam Pascal (Rent & Aida). All proceeds go directly…
Taylor Dayne to Headline Pink Aid Gala at Paramount
Pop rock singer Taylor Dayne will headline a fundraising gala for Pink Aid at the Paramount on Oct. 9. The gala, in honor of Breast Cancer Awareness Month, aims to raise more than $1 million for underserved breast cancer patients. Pink Aid said the gala will include Dayne performance and personal cancer insights, The program will include a professional designer fashion show by Mitchells, and …
Boutique Beat: T-shirts for Pink Aid at Thred Boutique in Patchogue
#BoutiqueBeat: T-shirts for Pink Aid at #Thred Boutique in #Patchogue #BreastCancer #LongIsland #LI
T-shirts are now being sold at Thred in Patchogue to raise funds for Pink Aid, a not-for-profit that helps underserved women survive breast cancer treatment.
And the message is as straightforward as it comes. (more…)
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Pink Friday
Today’s donations: The Pink Fund and Pink Aid
If you know me, you know that I know far more about breast cancer than I wish I knew. But I also know that knowledge about breast cancer, and cancer in general, is vastly incomplete and constantly, and often rapidly, and radically changing.
So it was with great fascination that I read a recent New Yorker story by Pulitzer Prize-winning medical historian/philosopher Siddhartha Mukherjee (author of “The Emperor of Maladies”) exploring new thinking in the oncology world. Check it out here. It’s a great read. It has to do with mussels in Lake Michigan. It has to do with seeds and soil. It has to do with… well, read it.
But here’s the crux of it: Mussels originating as a rather innocuous presence in the Black Sea, dumped in bilge water by Ukrainian ships a few decades ago, have dominated destructively in Lake Michigan but not so much elsewhere. Similarly for the plant know as Japanese knotweed, it’s of no great concern in its land of origin, but has wreaked havoc to native species and various crops in England. And, so it seems to be with cancer, where, for example, metastasized breast cancer cells regularly take hold in livers, brains and bones, but not so much in other organs. Not to mention that larger not so much in some people at all.
Standard treatment has been to blast the invading forces, which is what cancer is to some extent. But maybe we could learn more about why cancer fails in some places, what keeps it from taking hold, and work with the “soil,” so to speak, to make it less hospitable. Maybe we need to explore not just cancer, but the ecology of cancer — “Once we think of diseases as ecosystems,” Mukherjee writes, “then, we are obliged to ask why someone didn’t get sick.” And by “we,” I mean scientists who do this stuff. So not really we, or at least not me.
“Cancers, like mussels, proliferate in congenial habitats, and, like mussels, they can create microenvironments that help them resist predators,” he writes. “Seed therapies kill cells—something like spraying a lake with a mussel poison. Soil therapies, by contrast, change the habitat.”
This is truly holistic medicine, not in the New Agey woohoo-ness the term has come to hold — the “patchouli-scented catchall for untested folk remedies,” as Mukherjee puts it — but rather the treatment of a whole person.
And maybe the same thinking needs to go more for the whole whole person when it comes to other aspects of being a cancer patient, the day-to-day life and the impact beyond chemo side-effects into other side-effects. One major aspect is financial. We tend to focus on insurance coverage, the costs of treatment, and overlook the other impacts, such as inability to work, pay non-medical bills, provide for families and such. That’s where Pink Aid and the Pink Fund have been focused.
The Pink Fund distributed $671,000 via 611 grants in fiscal year 2016-17 — with a total of 1568 grants in the decade since the Michigan-based organization was founded. More than half of the money last year covered housing costs, with the rest going for transportation, utilities and a small part for insurance. The Pink Fund cites statistics showing that 20-to-30 percent of women diagnosed with breast cancer will lose their jobs, and 10 million at any time are unable to cover rent, food and utilities. And that financial peril can, in turn, impact health and treatment both directly and indirectly via stress and depression, as if that’s not rough enough without having to worry about paying bills. The group recently conducted a study of the financial impact on patients and the results are shocking:
- 47 percent of women are using their retirement account to pay for out of pocket expenses and 26 percent are paying with their credit card. - 73 percent of patients considered altering or skipping their medication or treatment to save money – and 41 percent actually acted on it. - 37 percent are still in debt – and 23 percent nearly went broke. - 36 percent reported losing their job or being unable to work due to a disability caused by treatment.
Pink Aid shares the mission, as it states on its site:
“When a woman is diagnosed with breast cancer, she needs a lot more than medical help. She needs rides to and from treatments, babysitting, grocery delivery, medical navigation, wigs, recovery garments and so much more.”
To address this, it supports local clinics and community organizations providing services in Connecticut and Long Island, and also via its Pink Purse program makes emergency assistance grants to individuals in need.
I spotlighted the Pink Fund and my personal connections to the subject two years ago in this space (read it here), but it it more than deserving or another boost, and via a matching fund of $65,000, donations to the Pink Fund are being doubled through the end of the year. Pink Aid, of which I’ve learned more recently, is also deserving support for its community contributions. Both hold various events to raise funds and awareness — Pink Aid’s annual luncheons and fashion shows, the Pink Fund’s “Dancing With the Survivors” galas. But the needs are greater than can be covered by those things alone.
It’s all about treating the person, not the disease, as Mukherjee concludes his investigation, “not what you have, but what you are.” And that goes beyond the medical aspect. Doing it will take some mussel. Er, muscle. Or both.
- Steve Hochman
About this blog: Causes and Effect: My Year of Giving Daily, was started in 2013 by entertainment and culture journalist Melinda Newman, who made daily donations to a wide variety of non-profits and wrote about her experience. USA Today music writer, Brian Mansfield took on this monumental task in 2014. Since then, various writers have taken turns with stints, as the effort comes to a close at the end of 2017.
About Steve Hochman: Steve has covered popular, and unpopular, music for more than 32 years, most of that time as a key member of the Los Angeles Times’ music team. He is currently music critic for Pasadena station KPCC’s morning magazine “Take Two” and a regular contributor to BuzzBandsLA and to his own Make Mine Baconwrapped blog. He hosts interview-and-performance sessions at the Grammy Museum in Los Angeles and at New Orleans’ annual Jazz and Heritage Festival. His byline has appeared in an array of major publications, including Rolling Stone, Billboard and Entertainment Weekly and New Orleans’ Offbeat and he’s written liner notes for a range of projects, from an elaborate book in Disney’s award-winning box set of music from the Howard Ashman-Alan Menken animated musicals to reissues of Emerson, Lake and Palmer’s first four albums. He’s thrilled to be sharing this month’s C&E with Geoff Mayfield.
