Breast Cancer Awareness Month

October is Breast Cancer Awareness Month and I wanted to take the opportunity to highlight some of the amazing work of Breast Cancer Care, one of the charities I am raising money for.

• Nearly 46,000 people are diagnosed with breast cancer in the UK each year. That's one person every 11 minutes.
• Just over 12,000 people die from breast cancer in the UK every year.
• Breast cancer is the second biggest cause of death from cancer for women in the UK, after lung cancer.
• There an estimated 550,000 people living in the UK today who have had a diagnosis of breast cancer.
• In women under the age of 35, breast cancer is the most commonly diagnosed cancer.

A few years ago, I spent some time in hospital on a surgical ward where the majority of the patients were undergoing mastectomies. The strength and cheeriness of these women through incredible adversity was inspirational, but one memory will stay with me forever. A young, beautiful woman with a young, beautiful husband and a young, beautiful child was admitted to the ward. They looked like the perfect family. Shortly after her operation, she returned to the ward and her husband came in to see her. He clearly saw her as every bit the beautiful woman she had been before, but she couldn't look him in the eye. It was such a sad but powerful expression of the pain that must go along with losing such a key aspect of our femininity and the impact that has on how we feel and identify with ourselves and others, and I have never forgotten that day. Breast Cancer Care work everyday to try and prevent any woman from having to feel that pain, to save lives and to provide key support, both emotional and practical, for women and their families who are fighting this battle even as you read this.

For more details of this charity and the work they do, please visit http://www.breastcancercare.org.uk/about-us/who-we-are/ and then visit http://www.justgiving.com/mimcycleskenya and support their work and that of two other fantastic charities, Jo's Cervical Cancer Trust and Ovarian Cancer Action.