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July 1, 2010
I PROMISE YOU
How a daughter’s love launched a global movement to discover the causes of breast cancer.
July 25 is my mother’s birthday. She will be eighty years old this year. I will be celebrating this glorious milestone with my family, a gift I worried I would not see thirty-five years ago when she was diagnosed with breast cancer. There was no awareness then, no pink ribbons, no pink washed October as we know it today. There was only shock and awe and, except for a loving family, isolation. My mother and I have been fortunate over the years for her long and healthy life. Unlike hundreds of thousands of women who have died since she was first diagnosed, her breast cancer has never returned. How sad and shocking that literally millions of other women have been stricken with this disease in an unremitting and enlarging pandemic whose horizon is now bleeding into developing countries.
Over the years I have been deeply grateful for my mother’s health and survival, but as a scientist and surgeon I have always wondered, why did she get breast cancer in the first place? From 1977 through 1995, as I slowly made my way out of a job as a medical secretary and into medical school, then through surgical residency and the inaugural fellowship on the Breast Service at Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center, this one question never left me, especially when I began to treat thousands of other women with breast disease and breast cancer. Indeed, why are all these women getting this disease?
It wasn’t until 2007, as I was nearing the end of my masters program at McGill University — the International Masters For Health Leadership — that I began to think seriously about what I could do to help answer this age old, oft-ignored mystery about the underlying causes breast cancer, not just here in the United States or in other developed countries, but also in the developing countries around the world where breast cancer now is the number one female cancer and cause of cancer death. Having observed in my studies and research that the major breast cancer foundations – all doing impressive work to cure the disease – were doing precious little to prevent it, I decided to make a promise to my mother, and women everywhere, to do everything I could to discover the causes of breast cancer and to use this knowledge to prevent the disease.
With that promise in mind I organized the Breast Health & Healing Foundation in April 2008. I continue on my mission, now with many wonderful supporters and collaborators from Caribou to Kuwait, from Guyana to Uganda. It has been a blessing to see the enthusiasm and commitment from so many people who, like me, see a future in which we can eliminate breast cancer by applying the Pure Cure, prevention. The Pure Cure requires our understanding of the causes of breast cancer. I promise you we are working on this mission every day. This is my promise and my gift to my mother and to every other woman on the planet.
Happy Birthday, Mom.
Kathleen T. Ruddy, MD
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