Breast Cancer Awareness Month 2009 = crazy busy!

I’m barely two days into breast cancer awareness month and I already feel like I’ve been going full-tilt for weeks. In the last several weeks I’ve been out trying to sell as many tickets as I can for the Novakoski Quality Collision raffle. We’re giving away a 2006 Ford Mustang convertible & raising money for the C95 Radio Marathon for Breast Cancer Research. Tickets are only 2 bucks and I just can’t understand why we have NEVER sold this out! We only have 20,000 tickets available, and I think it shouldn’t take that long to sell 20,000 tickets…but it does. This year I would REALLY love to sell this raffle out! It’s such a super hot car and I have loved every minute of cruising around in it, especially when we finally got some hot weather (in September!). It seemed like I had the top down (on the car) every day with the sun beating down on my face and the wind tossing my hair around. Before breast cancer I HATED getting my hair messed up. Maybe it’s because after losing your hair it feels AWESOME to have hair that the wind can blow through. So, I’ve been going wherever I can think of to try and sell tickets. I’ve sold a lot…but I’m exhausting myself because I have my fingers in quite a few pies right now.

Breast cancer awareness month tends to get pretty busy for me. There are so many events and requests for me to be here and there. I’ve learned over the past 9 years that I have to pace myself. I’m not invincible - much as I sometimes think I am Last week I did two speaking engagements, sold tickets at several different places, rocked out with Keith Urban, and was away for the weekend for one of the speaking engagements I had. To top it all off, several projects I got involved in earlier this year are now coming to fruition.

I did a film interview in Calgary in July for a couple of upcoming projects, and I wrote a column for Living Beyond Breast Cancer. The column is in the new fall 2009 newsletter for LBBC. When I was asked to write about some of my experiences living with metastatic breast cancer I came up with numerous ideas and agreed on one of them with the editor. 550 words was all I had to come up with, so I sat down one day while I was out camping and just typed out everything that flowed out of me. Then I did a word count and it totalled over 2,000 words!! Needless to say, I spent the rest of the afternoon “slashing and burning” (editing) to get the word count down without losing the important points of the story. I managed to get it to about 700 words and sent it to the editor for her opinion. She had some great advice and we got it to 550 words - ready to publish. I kept a couple different edits of the original draft, thinking I would post it here on my blog. That’s when the next opportunity came along…

The film interview I’d done in July had been edited and is being used for 2 different projects. One is a new website that just launched today called www.TellHER2.ca. The other is a documentary about women living with HER2+ breast cancer that will premiere at Rethink Breast Cancer’s Breastfest Film Festival in Toronto in November. I was asked to do media interviews for the website and quickly agreed. After all, it’s SO EASY for me Talking is much easier than organizing some kind of fundraiser…at least it is for me. I did my first interview about the website this morning with Kelly from a New Brunswick radio station and it was so much fun. I have a feeling there will be a lot more to come because it’s a great website and is long overdue for those of us affected by HER2+ breast cancer in Canada.

And of course something else got tossed into the mix! The editor of the Saskatoon Star Phoenix (our local newspaper) emailed and asked if I would be willing to be a guest columnist for a special edition of the paper that’s being published on October 7th. They are doing something similar to what the Winnipeg Free Press did in June of 2008 for the World Conference on Breast Cancer…the entire paper will be printed on pink paper and will be distributed to subscribers AND non-subscribers and it will also raise money for the Les & Irene Dube Centre of Care (Saskatoon’s Breast Health Centre). I told the editor about the column I’d written for LBBC and he asked to see my original draft as well as the shorter draft that LBBC published. Luckily he really liked my original draft and it’s being published in the October 7th PINK edition of the Saskatoon Star Phoenix. After it’s been published in the SP I will post it here as well.

I’ve got lots of requests to speak and take part in other events that are coming up this month but haven’t given anyone a concrete answer yet. Gotta get through the CIBC Run for the Cure this weekend and  then I can slow down for a couple of days. I hope. Of course I decided to be the team captain for our C95 Radio Marathon team for the Run for the Cure so I’ve got a few things to do to get ready for that and tomorrow is the only day to do it. I can’t even think past Sunday and what’s coming up after that.

Obviously we have the C95 Radio Marathon coming up October 22 & 23 so there’s numerous things I’m doing for that, and I haven’t even mentioned that the garden is still full of all the veggies that have to be picked and brought in PDQ before frost hits….