About 2 weeks ago, I had the privilege to attend this conference in Jacksonville, Florida sponsored by the Young Survival Coalition, Susan G. Komen Race for the Cure, and Living Beyond Breast Cancer. I was the recipient of one of their scholarships that paid for my airfare and my registration fee.
I flew down on a Thursday and was able to spend some time with one of my best friends and her family, then she took me to the conference downtown at the Hyatt on Friday. I was able to stay at the hotel on Friday and Saturday, thank you to the generosity of my family. Everywhere you looked there was pink stuff. As we drove up there was a van that said "Feel Your Boobies"! Ha, ha! You have to remember that this conference was for all young women who had been diagnosed with breast cancer under the age of 40.
There were about 800 attendants there. It was a bit overwhelming to walk in and realize that all of those women had battled breast cancer and they were ALL young. I attended the workshops specifically for women who were in my position: living with advanced breast cancer. Just the amount of us in that room was overwhelming. They gave out lei's for us to wear to identify how long since diagnosis or if you had advanced bc. There were a lot of us with orange lei's. Way too many.
There were all kinds of booths to look at, including one for Pure Romance that was so big if you just saw that, you might have thought you were at another kind of conference-Ha, ha! Some of the t-shirts we saw: "Forget the Whales, Save our Boobies", "Stupid Cancer!", "I went through chemotherapy, and all I got was this lousy t-shirt", "Trust your journey", etc. There were even little onesies for babies with different pertinent sayings. A lot of the booths focused on advocacy, healthy concerns, breast reconstruction, new drugs, and new blood tests that you can now get. There was one little boy signing books and giving them away the first night. His name was Luca, and he helped his mom, a breast cancer survivor, write a book called, "Chemo Cat". He came up to us and gave us his last books that he had to give away and signed our copies. Katelyn really liked reading it with me. Other booths sold jewelry to raise money for breast cancer research.
The workshops were not the best part of the conference. Really I wasn't too impressed with the first two that I attended. I think a lot of that is because of my involvment in the YSC bulletin boards. Much of what I heard there, I had already learned from the intelligent women on that board and my own research. One of the encouraging things that I did learn was that the Susan G. Komen foundation is now only giving their money towards research and not bc awareness. I think that is a great thing. If you are not aware of breast cancer when you can't even open a can of tomato soup without seeing a pink ribbon, then you have been living in a hole. We don't need awareness, we need a cure!
The best part was meeting all of the ladies that I had talked and cried with on the boards for dinner that night and making those connections. Many of us have young children. Some of them are married without children. Some are single. A few of the married ones without children even got married after they were diagnosed with stage IV bc. What a great response, showing their stamina and willingness to fight and live their life to the fullest.
One of the women that I connected with on Friday night, I felt a huge bond with. That is because, in the course of walking to the restaurant, we discovered that our husbands are both pastors at Baptist churches. I think that she is going to be a great friend and I am really excited to get to know her better. I met a few other women who are not stage IV, but they really weren't afraid to hang out with us mets girls (short for metastatic bc). I think because they realize that any one of them could be in our shoes. I did not feel that resistance to hang out with us that I have heard from other women who have felt isolated in support groups and things because they represented the worst case scenario in the breast cancer world. Anyways, I digress.
Basically all that to say, that each and every woman that I met from our board at the Young Survival Coalition was warm and inviting and welcomed me with open arms. That was what the conference was all about for me: Networking and meeting other beautiful warriors who have fought or are currently fighting breast cancer. Saturday night they had a dinner and then they opened up the dance floor. I danced only a little, but it was such a cool thing to "rock out" with these women and dance in defiance of the disease that has affected all of us. It was truly a weekend to remember.
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