Yesterday I had the honor of attending the annual Breast Cancer Lobby day at the Capitol with the Virginia Breast Cancer Foundation as an advocate and spokesperson. What an interesting experience! We met up at 9am to discuss the pending vote on Medicaid Expansion and the Every Woman's Life initiatives and then broke off into small groups to go one-on-one with various delegates of the House and Senate to talk about the upcoming vote and our position in general. Here I am with two of my friends while we were waiting to be recognized during the House meeting:
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| With Dana & Lynda, from the Fall BraZaar team |
This wasn't a "glamorous" event, we had work to do. Luckily my group got the pleasure of meeting with the Speaker of the House Delegate Howell who it turns out has a wife who is also a breast cancer survivor and a very passionate supporter of programs to help women in similar situations. It was absolutely humbling to be able to share my own story about the gap in our healthcare and insurance that I faced 12 years ago and to in turn hear from my elected representative the things he's done and plans to do to help prevent just that sort of thing from happening in the future. One thing I learned is we've come a LONG way just in 10 years in caring for the newly diagnosed and reaching lower-income woman...but the other side of the coin is that death rates aren't declining nearly as fast.
To relate, my own story is that I was a divorced single mom, only 29, when a suspicious lump that I'd been wondering about began to get larger. My fiance (now husband) at the time encouraged me to go get checked out. I did but my insurance would not pay for a definitive mammogram, citing I wasn't 40 yet and the odds of it being anything other than fibrocycstic were slim. This mind you with a mother who has had a mastectomy and a great-aunt who died from breast cancer.
I put off my exam for almost 3 months, I didn't have $800 out of pocket. Finally at my fiance's insistance I put it on a credit card and sure enough, there was a tumor. Well at that point the insurance decided they might pay something after a needle biopsy confirmed findings. I had an excision 2 weeks later but by this time what started as DCIS was progressing towards Stage I. I had a tumor the size of a "golf ball" per the surgeon, one very close to my lymph nodes under my arm.
I was lucky. They caught it in time. But how many women in similar circumstances HAVE a credit card to put $800 on? Why should they have to? And more importantly, how many may have died from metastatic cancer who had they been able to afford the diagnostic screening caught it in time instead? I "did everything right" and did my self-exams and yet the system initially failed me.
That is unacceptable, to let poorer women die in America, waiting for care that could save them.
It was because of this I decided to attend this event and I have worked with various organizations to further not only awareness but research into this deadly disease. The expansion of the Medicaid Act in Virginia if delayed will cost our state $5 million dollars a DAY in lost Federal funds, something that could literally spell the difference between staying open and closing hospital doors in rural counties. Sad to say, the more remote areas like Tazewell, Rappahannock, Mecklenburg take the hit much more than even those in inner-city Richmond and the surrounding areas.
We got to speak with five delegates before being recognized on the House floor by Delegate McQuinn, also a survivor herself. Five more voices hopefully for those who don't have one right now until a cure is found. To learn more, visit this wonderful organization at www.vcbf.org
