WE ARE BRIGHT PINK

Sarah
Sometimes I wish I could fold paper cranes until there was no more cancer in this world. Other days, I am just a public health graduate student at Columbia studying and working hard.

How do you explain what it feels like to be named after an aunt you have never met, but whom you imagine to be beautiful and tall and brilliant? How do you explain what it means to see your mother cry for her sister--the one who survived breast cancer--as her bone marrow transplant fails and ovarian cancer takes over her body? How do you tell someone that you were five years old when you realized that your grandmother had only one breast or that every female relative on your mother's side of the family has had breast cancer?

It feels like I have never known life without breast cancer. My name stands as a memorial to my aunt Sarah, who died of breast cancer at the age of 30, long before I was born. My mother says, though, that I do not make her think of her sister, but of "everything that came after." The year that my aunt Giah died of ovarian cancer, my cousin and I spent hours folding origami cranes, after reading a Japanese legend that said that folding a thousand paper of these paper birds could make sick people healthy again,. Nearly fifty years ago now, my grandmother, too, had breast cancer; but her wrinkled 91 year-old frame tells me that is possible to live through and with this disease.

I work very hard to keep breast cancer from becoming a determining piece of my identity. I am setting-up breast cancer screening procedures that will monitor me without controlling or taking-over my life. I will continue to eat healthily and exercise in spinning classes at my gym because they make me feel healthy and powerful.

Breast cancer is only a part of me, even if I do not always know which part of me or exactly in what way it is part of me. I live with new information about genetic disposition toward breast cancer, and also know that this is never the whole story.

On the wall of my kitchen, there is a poster that gives me strength, and spunk, and hope. It is a picture of the torso of a young curvy woman wearing a tight white tank-top that reads:

When we get our hands on breast cancer, we're going to:

• Punch it
  
• Strangle it
  
• Kick it
  
• Spit on it
  
• Choke it and
  
• Pummel it
  
• Until it's good and dead.
  
• Not just horror movie dead but really, truly dead.
  
• And then we're going to tie a pink ribbon on it.

For the past few months, this poster has been plastered all over bus stops throughout New York City. And sometimes walking down the street, listening to my ipod and hurrying from one place to another, I will see it, pause for a second, and then smile. I think of the women of my family, but I think of the future, too. This fall, I will enter my first year of medical school.