When Health Disparities Hit Too Close to Home

As we close on Black History Month we wanted to share the following note from a long-time advocate and friend of the National REACH Coalition. She wrote to Charmaine Ruddock (NRC Board Chair), regarding her deep distress about disparate outcomes of cancer. Her distress was brought on by the fact that Charmaine had shared with her that Lark Galloway Gilliam had had her health concerns ignored until, finally, she was diagnosed with the cancer that took her life. The writer of the note to Charmaine illustrated her concerns by recounting the different experiences of two friends of hers, one white, the other black who were both diagnosed with cancer but who had very different outcomes. She also added a very personal perspective, that of her own experience as she now is getting treated for cancer. The thoughts she articulated were so powerful we asked her if we could share them with you. She agreed.

Here is what she wrote:

“What’s really been on my heart and mind since we spoke about Lark is what you had shared about her reporting symptoms about a year ahead of her diagnosis and being blown off. I have carried the heaviness of that information at all of the last steps of my process, wondering how differently my care would go if I were a black woman. I am enraged to think that a woman who spent her life railing against health disparities would, in the end, become a victim of them.

I was thinking about the exercise during the Painting the Picture of Health Equity session with Dr. Nita Mosby Tyler [a keynote presentation at the DNPAO May training in Atlanta] where she asked us to list what we were just exhausted about. After hearing Lark’s story, CLEARLY what I am most fed-up with/exhausted about/enraged by is all the words about health equity and so little real action in play in our major medical institutions. I lost a dear friend, our church’s youth minister, to breast cancer 5 years ago. At exactly the same time, another friend was going through a seemingly identical breast cancer journey.

Late stage diagnosis, first a lumpectomy, radiation, mastectomy, chemo….but they had fundamentally different outcomes. My first friend, Jonyrma, was black and died; my second friend, a white woman, is now classified a survivor (MAN do I now HATE that term! Seems so judgmental, as though some worked hard enough to survive and, well, the other ones didn’t.) I have actually been afraid to say in words anything about her living and Jonyrma dying for fear it would in some way jinx [her] but I just had to tell you, I SEE the difference in outcomes and it enrages me.”

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