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>> Annual General Meeting 2007

An Update on the Breast Cancer Advocacy Coalition (BCAC)

PLUS An Evening with Lyn Swinburne & Raelene Boyle

Livlif Exhibition

ANNUAL GENERAL MEETING 2007

Report by Sue Claridge

We were privileged to have Margaret Clark, editor of the book Beating Our Breasts, as the guest speaker at the AGM on the 23rd of May. Professor Clark, Professor of Political Science at Victoria University in Wellington, received the Distinguished Companion of the New Zealand Order of Merit for her services to education in the New Years honours this year. She was at the AGM to share her journey with breast cancer and her role in bringing Beating Our Breasts to print.

I flew here this afternoon with [Beating Our Breasts] in my handbag,” she told the assembled BCN members. “And I’m delighted to tell you that I was not ashamed of it. I looked at the foreword and I don’t think I would change a word.”

Margaret was diagnosed with breast cancer nine years ago and “reluctantly signed up to the club” that no woman wants to become a member of. She acknowledges that even in the relatively short period of time since her diagnosis there have been improvements in treatment, and that women diagnosed today have better options than she. Her diagnosis was prior to the introduction of sentinel node biopsy, and she had her lymph nodes – “all the underpinnings of my arm” – removed.

Horrifying her surgeon, Margaret refused to take time off work, and with drainage tubes still in her armpit, she appeared in the lecture theatre every morning (followed by radiation every afternoon) wearing a raincoat, leaving, she believes, an indelible impression on her 17 and 18 year old students.

She emphasises the progress made in the treatment of breast cancer by relating her discoveries upon reading a history of the treatment of breast cancer.

If you ever doubt that there has been progress, I’d like to refer you to that book,” she said.

Because, up until 100 years ago, or less, women with breast cancer were in the same place – mentally, physically and psychologically – as lepers. Nothing could be done, women hid the evidence as long as they possibly could, until they stank”, she told us, admitting that she did so in order to shock us.

Then William Halsted, a surgeon at John’s Hopkins University, began to undertake radical surgery – mastectomy – on women in an effort to save them.

Initially he was reviled by the medical profession: he was seen to be a butcher! But some of his patients did live – not many, but some. Modern breast surgery is much less disfiguring and to this day progress is being made.”

Once you get cancer, you join a club. You meet more and more people with cancer.” Meeting more and more people with breast cancer led to the compilation of Beating Our Breasts. Close friend, Gillian Dean, suggested she compile abook.

“‘Right,’ Gillian said, ‘as a form of therapy for yourself, and as a gift for other people, you will put together a compilation of other people’s stories.’” Margaret related, and went to say that personally knew every woman whose stories appear in the book.

“The quality of the prose [in these stories], the quality of the honesty, the quality of truth, is truly mindboggling,” she says with obvious pride.

Margaret also paid tribute to Christine Cole Catley, of Cape Cately publishers, who we were also privileged to have with us at the AGM, referring to her as the “midwife” of Beating Our Breasts, and without whom the book would not have been possible. Serendipitously, Chris Cately was at Victoria University as Margaret was working on the book. When Margaret told her about the project, Chris responded instantly that she wanted to publish it.

Margaret has written many books, but says that Beating Our Breasts is the most precious. She says that women need to talk to each other about their experiences, as the women in this book do through their stories. The book is provided free to Wellington women upon their diagnosis as part of a Cancer Society package. Margaret says she wants there to be some humanity in the material that they receive, not just “dry as dust” science.

Last month at her nine-year “clearance”, Margaret wanted to know effectively when she would be “cured”, asking her surgeon how long she would have to come each year to be “poked around” and have a mammogram.

“He replied firmly ‘Until you are dying of something else.’” she told us with a laugh.

“So, there is no cure,” she said, without a hint of morbidity. But there is humanity and there is always hope.

* The book was published in 2000.

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