Celebrity breast cancer is different to ordinary breast cancer. If you have the former, the ITN news channel will state that "the world is in shock" for you; your diagnosis will be a front-cover newspaper story - as will your operation - and you will immediately become "strong" and "brave".
Kylie Minogue is a good person who everyone hopes will make a speedy recovery from a dreadful disease. She did not ask for the media circus around her. But there has been more written about breast cancer in the last fortnight than there has been in the last few years combined, simply because of her celebrity status. It's like Heat magazine is running the NHS.
The whole world is not in shock for Kylie. Most of the world doesn't know who she is and some of that non-Kylie world are battling with their own serious illnesses - without ITN's intercession. Breast cancer charities - mainly in Britain and Australia - have been inundated with phonecalls from young females - a low-risk group for breast cancer - desperate for information about this disease that's being written about in their weekly celeb-gossip mag. Meanwhile, the ladies who lunch for charity are probably thinking "breast cancer is the new AIDS".
The consensus seems to be that a celebrity going public with her disease (as if she had any choice) might have a positive knock-on effect in that it would raise awareness of this pernicious condition. That's fantastic thinking - all we need now is a male pop celebrity to get prostate cancer.
The media do have a role to play in the dissemination of information about cancer, but it's certainly not that newspaper feature the other day which beside a story about Kylie carried a panel on "Other famous people who have had breast cancer!". Neither is it when a colleague was talking to a newspaper editor about a feature on breast cancer and was asked to send in pictures of women with the disease - "Can you make sure they're good-looking women with breast cancer?" asked the editor.
One of the best advertisements ever made was called "The Palmist". Directed by Paul D'Auria, it was located in a fairground and showed a young boy going into a fortune-teller's tent. The voiceover said: "As a boy, I went to see a palmist. Her verdict was a long and happy life. When I saw doctors in June 1991, their verdict was I had six months left to live. I decided to believe the palmist. In the last six years, everything that could have been cut of my body has been cut out. Except for my will to live. As long as I'm around I'll be fighting cancer. Not just my own. Everyone's." As the lifelines on the boy's hand slowly become scars on a cancer-ridden chest, we meet the narrator, who says: "That's why I directed this film". As his face fades, a telephone number comes up on the screen for a cancer charity.
D'Auria had 70 tumours and one lung removed as part of his cancer treatment. The fact that his ad was, ultimately, a begging letter says it all.
One in 12 Irish women will be diagnosed with breast cancer, with more than 600 dying from it each year. But there are two different types of women in the country. There are those who have free and direct access to BreastCheck, the national breast cancer screening programme, which is vital for early detection, and those who don't. It's all to do with where you live in the country. Women who live in the south and the west should really try not to get breast cancer because the Government doesn't provide the BreastCheck facility in their area. It is hoped the service will be rolled out sometime during 2007. They should be so lucky.
