10KSA Ambassador Anne Miltenburg is The Brandling, a travelling brand developer on a mission to empower changemakers to create bigger impact through branding. She believes branding and brand thinking are crucial in helping entrepreneurs in business, education, health, conservation and empowerment to get the audience they deserve and create a bigger impact. With a home base in The Hague, she has lived and worked in places as diverse as Paris, Bamako, Seoul, Sydney and Riyadh. 10KSA is a holistic health initiative with a focus, in 2015, on breast cancer. The 10KSA vision is to be recognized as Saudi Arabia's primary holistic health engagement platform with global impact. To show her support for 10KSA, Anne wrote this testimonial about her own mother's struggle with breast cancer.
On December 31, 1996 the clock struck midnight, and from her hospital bed, my mother gazed at the city skyline, illuminated by beams of bright colorful fireworks. The dark room lit up in bright pink and yellow colors. She had been in the hospital since Christmas. There was no one else on the ward. Undoubtedly she would have thought: will this be my last New Year's Eve?
Twenty years later, I remember only flashes of my mother's battle with breast cancer -- I was then in my early teens. I must have blocked out the experience, and now most of my memories are her memories. As an adult, I look back on my mother's illness mostly with sadness over not providing enough support to her. I realize how lonely she must have felt.
The day of her diagnosis, she came back deeply distraught from the doctor's office. Her crying frightened me so much that I escaped to my room. One week later, right before Christmas, she went into the hospital. We must have visited her there, but I don't have a single recollection of the visits. Mostly, I remember how empty the house was without her. My stepfather went out a lot during those days, leaving the house to my brother and me. It was not until much later that I learned he spent those hours in tears at the neighbors' kitchen table, because he thought my mom would not make it, and he was trying to shelter us children from the pain.
During chemotherapy, my mother changed, and I shied away from her. Small things around her changed along with her: a wig sat on her bedside table, in case she woke up without hair one morning, and there was a breast prosthetic sitting in a little case. My mother never used the prosthetic: the operation had been so invasive that anything touching her skin would hurt her for the next 15 years. She had reconstructive surgery twice to combat the pain. It was as if the disease kept everything and everyone she loved at arms length.
Even though her family loved her truly and deeply, my mother still had to face cancer alone. At a time when the disease was still very often a death sentence, my parents protected us from their fear and pain, and my brother and I were too young to break through our shells.
The one clear memory I have of those difficult days, was accompanying my mother to radiation therapy. The hospital staff allowed me to come into the room, which looked like the deck of a starship. The radiologist would sit behind a large panel, in front of a window looking into a bare room, with a huge white machine inside. Behind the glass, my mom would take off her sweater and climb into the center of the machine. While a mechanical arm revolved around her, I would watch my mother staring at the colorful posters on the ceiling, placed there by an emphatic nurse. Between images of forests and wildlife was a photo of a black Labrador sitting in a field of yellow flowers.
Not long afterward, we got a black lab puppy, and she and my mother were inseparable for the next 15 years.
Becoming a 10KSA Ambassador - 10KSA is the Saudi Arabian breast cancer awareness initiative seeking to gather 10,000 women in Riyadh to create the world's largest human pink ribbon on December 12 - I realized how important it is to open up the conversation around breast cancer in a country where the disease is still shrouded in silence. Through this involvement, I am only now beginning to understand the importance of reopening the conversation around breast cancer in my own environment. No one should have to suffer disease, but if it comes your way, you should be able to feel supported by your family and friends. To feel supported by 10,000 women, however far away, now that's a thing to behold.