Time to splash Blue all over!
Today is the first day of March and the first day of Colorectal Cancer Awareness Month.
March is full of Blue Awareness, nationally and locally. Spread the message that colorectal cancer is preventable, treatable, and beatable.
Don’t hide your story! Tell your family, tell your friends, tell your coworkers. Get them screened, teach them the symptoms. Get them involved. Read the rest of this entry »
Four members of Congress want their colleagues to wear blue on March 7 to welcome Fight Colorectal Cancer advocates who will be on Capitol Hill that day.
In a Dear Colleagues letter, Charles Dent, Betty McCollum, Michael G. Fitzpatrick, and James P. McGovern asked other members to GO BLUE on March 7 to show their support for the advocates and draw national attention to colorectal cancer.
Their letter emphasized the importance of screening for prevention and early detection of colorectal cancer — the second leading cause of cancer death for men and women in the United States. They said that if everyone age 50 and over were screened for colorectal cancer, the death rate could drop by 50 percent.
The members wrote,
Together, we have the ability to reach thousands of Americans with the message that early detection of colorectal cancer saves lives. Please take a moment in March to help spread the word — give a floor speech, write an op-ed or put out a press release. And remember to “GO BLUE” on March 7.
Cindy Robinson
Fight Colorectal Cancer advocate Cindy Robinson of Virginia has successfully petitioned her governor, Bob McDonnell, to proclaim March as Colorectal Cancer Awareness Month. This is the second consecutive year that Virginia has issued such a proclamation as a result of Ms. Robinson’s activism.
Since President Clinton issued the first Presidential Proclamation recognizing March as Colorectal Cancer Awareness Month over a decade ago, each year advocates request that their state and city officials issue proclamations acknowledging March as Colorectal Cancer Awareness Month.
Ms. Robinson followed the easy steps laid out in Fight Colorectal Cancer’s Proclamations 101 advocacy call to action and sent the request via email according to Virginia’s guidelines. She also contacted her local state senator, Jill Holtzman Vogel, to put in a good word with the governor’s office.
We thank Virginia Govenor Bob McDonnell, Senator Jill Vogel and advocate Cindy Robinson for recognizing the need to raise awareness about colorectal cancer and taking the first steps needed to accomplish that task.
Get your Governor to declare Colorectal Cancer Awareness Month in your state. Visit our Proclamations 101 page for easy instructions.
Pat Steer
We are glad to welcome advocate Pat Steer to the Fight Colorectal Cancer Research and Treatment News. She’s been living with stage IV rectal cancer since 2004. A writer, she’s blogs about her life with cancer, training her beloved dogs, and her passion for good food at Life Out Loud.
Since my cancer diagnosis in 2004, my life has been full of choice and decisions. Cancer forces you to prioritize. Some days, it has seemed like cancer and treatment were calling all the shots in my schedule, changing my plans, and forcing decisions I didn’t want to have to make.
But I’ve made a few choices in the last eight years where I didn’t let cancer force my hand. I train and show dogs, and that’s very important to me. Early on, I decided to make attending my favorite dog shows a priority. I kept up my now-25-year tradition of camping with friends at a local show circuit. I entered a special event dog show held on New Year’s weekend, 2005 – three shows in 48 hours that wore me out, but was so worth the effort. I covered Westminster in 2008 through 2010 for my column.
All of those decisions meant that sometimes I prioritized dog shows in spite of my treatment schedule. My oncologist, who once told me “I want you to live your life,” carefully moved my treatments around to accommodate the things I really wanted to do. After all, what good is surviving cancer if you can’t do the things you love? Read the rest of this entry »
This weekend, Congress completed work on a large spending bill that maintains funding for colorectal cancer research and prevention. In the current budget-cutting environment, holding the line on research and prevention programs is a remarkable accomplishment and reflects the power of grassroots advocacy.
I congratulate the Fight Colorectal Cancer volunteers who took action this year to protect colorectal cancer research and prevention funding. We should be proud of our achievements, but we cannot become complacent. We must prepare for the Fiscal Year 2013 budget battle that lies ahead. Please register to attend Fight Colorectal Cancer’s Call-on Congress next March – where advocates from around the country will be urging their legislators to continue to protect colorectal cancer research funding.
The following are the spending outcomes on Fight Colorectal Cancer’s three appropriations priorities:
Together we are Strong
