Go Beyond a Routine of Awareness & Pink

Written by ROW Team Member Lauren Berk

rou·tine

/ro͞oˈtēn/
noun
performed as part of a regular procedure rather than for a special reason

Like so many, I thrive on routine. When I was a teacher at 58 years old, I still followed an end-of-summer routine that included shopping for new shoes, picking out new notebooks, deciding what to wear on the first day, and of course, getting my back-to-school physical.

I had been following this routine since kindergarten- I knew how it went. So when just a few days before the start of the new school year, a nurse took me to a small room and told me to wait, I could sense that something less than routine was about to go down. When I saw her approaching me with a pretty, floral pink tote bag in her hand, I thought…” uh-oh, only the very best parties have goody bags.”

That moment was the moment the word routine took on a whole new meaning. I had to unpack my school bag and pack my chemo bag.

Schools are great supporters of Breast cancer awareness month. There are literally pink pep rallies!. At the time I was diagnosed, my closet was full of pink awareness shirts- my routine, for years, included thinking pink in October. Yet, now that it was hitting so close to home, I realized I had been doing a lot more of the pinking and not enough of the thinking.

Breast Cancer Awareness means awareness that if you have 8 women in your life, then statistically you will know someone with this disease. Awareness is understanding that women are fighting to live with cancer rather than die from it. Awareness is the knowledge that along with medication and chemotherapy and radiation, grit and support are what women need to make it through.

As much as I hated my new routine of chemo, radiation, and cleaning what was left of my hair out of the drains, I realized that that club I had involuntarily become a part of, was becoming a part of me.

When you are diagnosed with cancer you kinda have an unsettling moment of trying to decide what to do with the situation. Who will you be in the face of it? In search of comforting wisdom, I reached out to a lifelong friend who had done battle and won. She asked me to trust her and sign up for ROW’s Power10 camp. I decided to trust her. I called ROW and said, “You don’t know me and I know nothing about rowing, but I am supposed to sign up for camp.”

ROW changed my life that spring by supporting me to change my routine. ROW gave me the skills to improve my outcomes, the motivation to do it, and a community with which to celebrate those small victories. Accessibility was the key that unlocked the power of ROW for me. As a single working woman going through treatment my resources of time, energy and finances were sorely strained. Had ROW not been organized the way that it was (and still is) and welcomed me to try with the only commitment being my willingness to show up, I probably would never have come. ROW showed me that even the heaviest burden can be lifted if we shoulder the weight together.

So think about what you consider your routines. Now, imagine them changing at a moment’s notice, in a small stuffy room. Think about who you would choose to be in the face of cancer. If you said- “I will choose to be strong where once I was weak,” “I will choose to test myself where once life tested me,” “I will choose together instead of alone”- then you would choose ROW.

So thank you for choosing ROW when you have the option to support so many other wonderful causes. Thank you for helping women, like me, to change their outcomes and their lives and make them anything but routine. Thank you for making your October go beyond just a routine of awareness and pink, and making it one of action and generosity.