Social Media for Good: Can Twitter and Facebook Help Fight Breast Cancer? (re: my Interview at Health.com)

My Friend and Daughters: Making a Difference at the Boston Avon Walk for Breast Cancer (2008)

For my Live with Abundance post this month, I’m highlighting a recent article at Time Inc.’s Health.com: Can Twitter and Facebook Help Fight Breast Cancer?, by Sally Chew and Heather Mayer. Heather Mayer interviewed me for the article, after finding my Mother’s Day post on breast cancer, where I compiled a number of awareness-raising and fund-raising links on breast cancer, which had passed by my Twitter stream that month. The interview is especially meaningful to me, because coming up twenty-five years ago this Jan., I lost my own mother, at the age of 47, to breast cancer. I have two beautiful girls now, who I hope grow up in a different world than their grandmother did, and though to a lesser extent due to improved awareness and treatments, still their mother, who if truth be told, approached her own fortieth birthday last summer, with an unspoken apprehension, that’s always been at the back of my mind, since I was sixteen years old—the age I was when I watched the disease gradually ravage and ultimately claim my own mother.

Living with the uncertainty of whether I might someday get breast cancer myself has fueled my life in both negative and positive ways. When I was younger, the knowledge of my own mortality, learned vicariously through my mother’s passing, made me a lot older, and probably more serious than many of my peers, at the time. But as I get older myself, I realize that the uncertainty is now partly responsible for “the live with abundance” mentality that I’m trying to express here. It’s hard to capture exactly what that mentality represents to me—but it’s about appreciating the moment, taking nothing for granted, most especially our relationships, and living generously—generously with our time, our attention, our words, our emotions, our deeds, and our money. It’s about holding nothing back. And it’s about not automatically thinking the worst. Yes, possibly I have inherited a tendency toward breast cancer. But just because my mother had it, doesn’t mean I will get it, and even if I do, that I will necessarily share the same fate.

I don’t regret the place in life this mentality has taken me. I like to tell people—I’m growing younger, not older. And yet, it struck my mother’s heart to the core, when after watching a recent breast-cancer- awareness-raising commercial, my ten year-old came to me and asked in some concern, “Am I going to get breast cancer?” And my seven year-old emphatically noted, “I don’t want to die.” In the past, they have worried about me. They’ve asked lots of questions about how my mother died, and what age I was when I lost her. For the most part, I have shielded them from that part of my life. But they know. They do the math. The fear is instinctive. And this summer was the first time they felt the fear not only for me, but also for themselves. And that’s something as a mother, I would rather they never had to experience. But I also realize I can’t protect them from it—it’s the silent fear that all women share.

So how does this all tie back to social media? Can you believe that with my family history, I had never once, until very recently, checked out a breast-health or breast cancer fundraising site? Not once. There was just never a day that I woke up and said, I want to think about breast cancer today. Not because I’m uncaring, but because to manage my life, and yes my fear, it’s a topic that I have chosen not to make front and center. The closest I ever came to researching any positive steps I could take to prevent breast cancer was when my kids were babies, and I read books about the benefits of breast-feeding not only for them, but also for me, by reducing breast cancer risk.

And then a good friend started participating in the Avon Walk for Breast Cancer a couple years back, even dedicating the walk to my mother and another mutual friend’s mother, who is a breast cancer survivor. I met my friend at the finish line in Boston, and I was moved at the time by the determination of the walkers and their commitment to make the future a better place. That’s the one drawback to living too much in the present—we forget sometimes that it’s still in our power to change tomorrow.

Along comes Twitter. I am signed up to numerous Twitter streams, mostly professional, but also personal (lots of foodie/cooking sites), and news sites. Along the way, others have passed along relevant links about breast cancer, both prevention (like signing up for e-mail mammogram reminders) and fund-raising activities (see my original post). I’ve passed along the links (called retweeting on Twitter), mainly out of respect for the people and organizations that are responsible for such a public service, but also out of a desire to help others.

In the end, the person I’ve probably helped the most is myself, by increasing my own awareness of the resources available to me, by providing myself the opportunity to meet amazing people (such as @JBBC) through this Live with Abundance series, and by finding ways that I can personally make a difference. Because the breast health or breast cancer links are nestled amidst my other day-to-day tweets and links, the topic somehow does not seem so formidable to me there. I click on the links, visit the sites, assimilate the information  in the same way I would at any other site, and then move on to the next tweet in my day-to-day stream. By sending out links on Twitter, people and organizations committed to breast health, fund-raising for a cure to breast cancer, or showing people how to journey beyond breast cancer are becoming part of my every day routine, and importantly, meeting me where I live.

Related Links

• Healthy Eating (via Health.com)
• Losing a Mother to Breast Cancer
• Summer of Social Good (sponsored by Mashable.com)
• Social Media for Good: Jennifer Bechard on the Detroit Hydrocephalus WALK (Walk is this Weekend, Sun., Aug. 2nd)