Life is Precious - Sigma Gamma Rho Sorority, Inc.

Artisha S. Lawson
40
As a national partner in the fight against all forms of cancer especially breast cancer, Sigma
Gamma Rho Sorority, Inc., through Hattie McDaniel Cancer Awareness, encourages local sorority
chapters to promote early prevention and health screens.
On the local level, chapters across the United States host annual workshops, forums and
partner with Susan G. Komen for the Cure through Race for the Cure to raise funds that finance
research to find the cure for this disease.
Theta Chi Sigma hosted a workshop in conjunction with the Lamp of Learning Foundation
to provide breast health resources in Chicago, while undergraduate chapter Pi Upsilon at Xavier
University collaborated with Alpha Kappa Alpha’s undergraduate chapter Rho Psi to host a
create-your-own sundae in order to collect donations for Susan G. Komen for the Cure.
Recent survivor Ms. Johnson, who declined to give her first name, is an African-American of
two, who believes she’s alive today because of a breast self-exam.
She urges women, especially African-Americans, to perform breast self-exams. Her daughter
brought a brochure home about how to do one.
“My daughter urged me to try and I felt something weird,” she said. “I wanted to cry. All I
could think about were my two children and what would happen to them.
“I was one of the lucky ones, because I caught it and because of my daughter went to see a
doctor. Everyone isn’t that lucky.”
Situations like Ms. Johnson’s aren’t as rare as one might think.
“Early detection is the best tool. In the past few years we have seen improvement. African-
American women have a lower chance of getting cancer, but a higher chance of dying from
it,” said Mary Westphal, executive director of the Susan G. Komen Foundation of Northwest
Ohio.
Westphal cites several risk factors for this situation.
“African-American women aren’t getting mammograms early when diagnosed, and Women,
especially those over 40 years old, should get yearly mammograms. If you received your period
at an early age or have a late menopause, you too are at a higher risk of breast cancer.
Breast cancer is the most common cancer in black women; it is also the second leading cause
of cancer death among black women, exceeded only by lung cancer. In 2009, almost 20,000
new cases of breast cancer and 6,020 deaths are expected to happen among black women. Although
black women contract breast cancer less than white women, they have a 37 percent
higher death rate.
Breast cancer survival in black women has increased in the recent decade, but fewer women
are getting their yearly mammograms.
From 1996-2004 the five-year survival rate for breast cancer among black women was 77
percent compared to 90 percent among white women.
I am a
cancer
survivor.
It’s been 14 years and I have been
reluctant to talk about it until recently.
It was while watching a television
commercial for a new vaccine for
cervical cancer that I knew I had a
story to tell.
Cancer has been a part of my life
since I was seven years old when my
paternal grandmother died of cancer.
Since then to me, cancer, by definition,
has always meant death. My father
and most of his siblings have died from
some form of cancer. So when I was
diagnosed, I just knew I was going to
die.
I had cervical cancer. I was always
reluctant to talk about my form of
cancer. It was 1991 when I was
pregnant with my first child when I first
heard terms such as “dysplasia” and
“pre-cancerous cells.”
My mind went back to when I was
in my late teens and started getting
yearly pap smears. Before the days of
the “safe sex” movement, I was like
most young women at that time. I was
only concerned about an unwanted
pregnancy. Most of our “boyfriends”
did not want to use condoms.
When I had my yearly pelvic
examination and pap smear, I was
always given the diagnoses of “nonspecific
vaginitis.” My gynecologists
could never tell me exactly what that
was. They would just say, “You have an
infection.” Even during times of sexual