‘Pester power’ to beat breast cancer

Praseeda Nair

DUBAI - Protect Your Mom (PYM), a zero-cost breast cancer awareness campaign, was founded by marketing professor Premi Matthew and her daughter earlier this year in a bid to apply advertising strategies to get the message across.

“If fast food companies and leading brands can market their goods to adults by targeting children, why can’t we spread awareness of a curable disease through the same concept?” Premi said, outlining the concept of the ‘pester power.’ The campaign aims to educate children on the largely ignored facts of breast cancer — how a simple do-it-yourself check is the first step in nipping the disease in the bud. “Once kids are aware of how severe breast cancer can be and how simple it is to cut down the suffering of dealing with the disease, they will relentlessly pester their moms to go for regular mammograms,” Premi added.

“Yearly walkathons and pink ribbons are a sign of goodwill that survivors are remembered and celebrated. But many women still feel like this can’t happen to them and choose to avoid a five-minute exam that could help detect cancer early and save lives.”

Protect Your Mom held its first large-scale event on Saturday in conjunction with the UAE’s pioneering youth group, The Republic, which regularly takes on causes and charity projects. Since an unfortunate side effect of chemotherapy is complete hair loss, the boys of the group pledged to shave their heads as a sign of solidarity under the slogan, “we choose to go bald so that our moms don’t have to.”

According to The Republic’s Head of Community Service, Shaikh Saleh, mass head shaving is one of the many shock-tactics that qualifies as effective marketing. All the members of the group posted the PYM campaign slogan and website address as their Facebook statuses, leading to hundreds of comments collectively. “Everyone is curious to know what the campaign is about and why the boys of The Republic would want to support this cause to the extent of shaving their heads as a group. More people who are curious, the more clicks the campaign gets,” Shaikh said.

Speaking at the event, stage-3 patient, Vanya Dobreva, shared her struggle with breast cancer with the students and her own four-year-old daughter Victoria. While the Bulgarian native was open to talking about her experience in hopes of spreading the message, a lot of women struggling with the disease choose to internalise their struggle.

According to Reem H, an Emirati survivor, there still remains a lot of stigma attached to this ‘B word’ in Dubai, despite the fact that the city glows pink all of October in support of Breast Cancer Awareness month. “I read about self-checks in an American women’s magazine and tried it out only to find an alarming lump. I knew I couldn’t talk to anyone about it, because no one would want to hear about something personal. After a few months, when the lump started to hurt, I went to the doctor. I was diagnosed with stage-2 breast cancer,” the 27-year-old bank manager said. After struggling with breast cancer in her early twenties, Reem recently found another lump, which to her relief turned out to be benign.

Many communities still keep breast cancer out of conversation, which in turn alienates sufferers and survivors in places where support groups are rare. Online forums become a solace to these people.”

Syed D, an accountant based in Dubai, was diagnosed with breast cancer last October. “When my doctor told me I had breast cancer, I felt like it was some sort of joke. I don’t think a lot of people know that men have breast tissue, just like women, and that we are susceptible to the disease,” he said.

Syed turned to an online forum for men suffering from breast cancer during the long months of his treatment in a way of coping with feelings of embarrassment and loneliness. “A part of me felt thankful that my family is in Islamabad,” he said. “I kept this hidden from them at first, not knowing how they would react. It’s bad enough to have cancer, but breast cancer would just destroy my parents,” he added. Eventually, after the chemotherapy had lapsed and his hair began growing back, Syed came clean to his family over skype, alerting them of the importance of early detection. “Awareness is so crucial. Young people are more open-minded, so hopefully such campaigns can get the word across to adults who don’t want to talk about it.”