A New Beginning for No Boobs About It.Org

After Hurricane Sandy blew through NYC taking with it the power to post for several days, came a wonderful surprise enabling a new beginning for No Boobs About It.

In my backlog of office mail was a letter from the IRS, our determination letter, informing me the No Boobs About It was now a public charity, a tax- exempt 501C3 organization (see letter in About Us section on this site.)! We are now able to accept donations via our website and raise funds through grant writing and other development activities. Contributions to No Boobs About It are tax deductible.

Over two years ago, months after my second primary breast cancer, I developed No Boobs About It as a blog site and began posting about things I believe patients and their families and friends wanted to know more about. I post about research findings, the experiences of other survivors, support services, resources and practical suggestions for getting through treatment and getting on with life.

Since posting to No Boobs About It, I continue to meet wonderful people who share what they are learning  and identify what they believe is needed in helping those diagnosed with beast cancer. There are many Internet sites and nonprofit organizations whose mission is to meet the needs of women and men who are newly diagnosed as well as those in treatment. There are few organizations that focus almost entirely on transitioning from active treatment to life as a survivor, a critical rite of passage for all who’ve had breast cancer.

No Boobs About It’s mission is to provide  services that facilitate new beginnings in survivorship. Why a new beginning ? Because, once active treatment is over, we can’t go back to the way things were…we are not the same people.

We have faced our own mortality. We’ve dealt with changes in body image related to surgery or weight gain of follow-up hormonal therapy. There has been pain and the side effects of treatment.  For many there is the financial fallout of treatments. Others experience the emotional pain of changes in relationships. All of us must find ways to harness our fears of recurrence so we can live our lives .

We look forward to that day when treatment ends, often without a plan for getting on with life. For many of us it is a “Now What” moment. We need to identify what we want to change, each of us needs to know how  a new beginning is going to give meaning to what we have just been through. We need to give ourselves permission to have a new beginning, however small or large it might be. We need to plan that new beginning and how we are going to make it happen. Otherwise we are going to be stuck in that transition period, unable to move ahead and incapable of  going back to where we were before breast cancer came into our lives.

In January, No Boobs About It will implement the first program on transitioning from active treatment to life as a survivor …New Beginnings Workshops, which are Skype supported sessions that will focus on the process of making a new beginning a reality. In addition to my sharing and offering guidance and support,  there will be other guest survivors sharing how they made their new beginnings happen.

The first No Boobs About It “New Beginnings” Workshop will be a pilot project to determine the length of each workshop, the times of day that are best for conducting future workshops and the content that needs to be covered in the workshop series.

In my next post I will discuss, in detail, our plans for the pilot project and the launch date.

I welcome hearing your ideas whether you are in treatment, approaching transitioning from active treatment or a survivor who wants help with a new beginning as a survivor.

I look forward to hearing from you.