Hurray for Jeanne Sather: The Assertive Cancer Patient

National Feel Your Boobies Week continues…

If there’s one thing that a successful patient has in battling their own disease, it’s assertiveness.

No good ever comes from being passive and letting the disease – any disease – control you.

THE ASSERTIVE CANCER PATIENT is Jeanne Sather’s blog devoted to how she is beating her own cancer.

Along the way, she tackles all sorts of cancer-related topics, from cancer myths to charity work, support groups and kittens.  One topic that Jeanne is passionnate about is cutting down on the multitude of, dare we say, “cancer-related crap”.

As she wrote back in September 2007, we should just BOYCOTT OCTOBER.  We don’t need pink-themed laundry detergent. Pink gardening clogs.  Pink soup.  Where does the pinkening of America every October stop?

Web Watch complete agrees with Jeanne - when you are stopped at a traffic light and the car in front of you has a Pink Ribbon car magnet,  Pink Ribbon antenna balls, and a Pink Ribbon auto freshener, what are we supposed to think?  That the car supports breast cancer? It’s like watching a breast cancer celebration parade float go by.  Web Watch know that’s not true, but that’s what it seems like.  By blanketing the landscape with unnecessary pink tie-ins, the pink ribbon has seemingly become synonymous not with the fight for the cure, but for the disease itself.  That’s a bad marketing image, not just bad marketing. 

See who Jeanne picked as the worst product tie-ins in 2007 and 2008.

In addition to what she writes in her blog, Jeanne also does some freelance writing.  In a Seattle Weekly article entitled GAG ME WITH A PINK RIBBON, she talks about how the Dahlia Lounge, a fine Seattle restaurant that Web Watch has dined at and highly recommends, created a pink-themed dessert – the proceeds of which were to be donated to a local organization.  Jeanne calculated that for each month they would sell about 204 of these $8 desserts, and from those sales the charity would receive approximately $800.

Jeanne’s stance?  Skip the dessert and the well-meaning restaurants and businesses that say they will donate a portion of the proceeds – and just send a check for that full bill directly to the charities being supported.    She goes on with more examples, such as don’t buy that bag of pink M&M’s for $3 when the charity just gets $0.50.  Send the $3 to the charity directly.

Jeanne’s definitely assertive.  For her, it works.  Assertiveness can work for you as well, if you let it.