October is breast cancer awareness month. All month you will see people wearing shirts with pink ribbons on them, the pink ribbon is a symbol given for breast cancer. People wear it to show support for the people who are diagnosed with breast cancer. A lot of sports teams will have pink outs throughout the month of october in support of breast cancer awareness. Many of greenwood’s sports teams have had pink outs this month, the football pink out will be Friday October 16th.

Breast cancer is the most common cancer. Many women are surviving the disease thanks to finding it earlier, and the improvements in treatments. The American Cancer Society is fighting and helping women find the cancer earlier in their lives so they can try to fight it before the cancer takes over. If the patients know their treatment options it has been proven that they deal better with the physical and emotional side effects. They also fund research to help find, and treat breast cancer. If the cancer is found early on then the chemotherapy isn’t as heavy as if it were found later on in the patient’s life.  

Some people may think that only women can get breast cancer but that isn’t true, men can get breast cancer too. Men don’t have as big of a chance because they don’t have as much tissue. Most men that are diagnosed with breast cancer are around the ages of 60 and 70. Doctors used to think breast cancer in men was more serious than in women but in fact they are actually equally severe. Men have basically the same symptoms as women; lumps in their chest or bleeding. Most men won’t even realize the lumps because there isn’t much tissue. Therefore the cancer has had time to spread. A common question that people have is, what is the difference in the treatments that men are given for breast cancer, and the answer is that they’re treated in just the same that women are.