Now there are people who believe that breast cancer is not such a big deal.   Get a lumpectomy, go to radiation for a few weeks, get on with your life.  What’s all the fuss?

The fuss is in the faces of the thousands of women and men who live with metastatic breast cancer, who do get on with their lives every day--caring for children between treatments; showing up at work despite treatment side effects that leave them exhausted; making plans for the time when they will be too sick to continue the routines that have defined their lives.

Pink is too pretty for cancer.  Cancer is ugly.  Yet there is beauty in the ways Stage IV patients show courage and dignity.  When we don that pink shirt or necklace, let's be brave enough to look these women in the face and remember them.