Imagine being 27. Long gone is the turmoil of beginning college classes. Long gone are the daily struggles with picking a major and stressors of fulfilling every last requirement to graduate with a degree in that field.
Imagine being 27. These are the days of working ridiculously long hours as an assistant story editor for 20/20. These are the days of enjoying a marriage still in its infancy. For Geralyn Lucas, these are the days of battling breast cancer.
The average age of female patients diagnosed with breast cancer is around 60, nowhere near the early twenties of most college students. This makes it far too easy to dismiss breast cancer as your grandmother's, your great-aunt's, your mother's disease. This makes it far too easy to avoid regular detection practices and ignore possible warning signs. This makes it far too easy to not make the walk just off campus to the Monona Terrace Convention Center tonight.
In support of her personal memoir "Why I Wore Lipstick to Mastectomy," journalist, television executive and survivor Geralyn Lucas will give a lecture discussing her experience with battling breast cancer.
Sponsored by UW Comprehensive Cancer Center, the event is open to the public free of charge and will undoubtedly be an evening of heightening awareness as well as empowering the cancer-patient community.
Written nearly 10 years after she first heard the diagnosis — nearly 10 years after she sought to challenge it far beyond a second opinion with examinations by seven, eight, nine different doctors — Lucas' book still garners attention, and with ample cause. "Why I Wore Lipstick" provides pages of comfort for the ailing, inspiration for the ill and insight for the bystanders.
While the comfort, inspiration and insight are in abundance, Lucas does not rely principally on eliciting empathy and sympathy from her readers in the manner of many memoirs. Such emotional responses are inevitable with the subject. Instead, Lucas still garners attention for this work due to the fierce strength, the humor she shows with the pen that she showed during every visit to the doctor's office, every dreadful feeling of looming defeat, every trip to the hospital.
Take the very first lines as representative of the more than 200 pages that follow: "I am the only woman in the room with my shirt on at the VIP Strip Club (except for the coat-check girl and she definitely doesn't count). So I am trying to blend in but it is not working … I have never been in a strip club before, and they would not allow me in without a man. It was more humiliating than being carded."
As honest and candid as Lucas makes "Why I Wore Lipstick," it is only a suggestion of the energy and optimism she offers in person. Beyond those printed words, Lucas transforms herself into an able figure bringing a message of pride to those well-versed in the everyday trials of defeating breast cancer. Beyond the growing population of survivors, Lucas' work — whether written or spoken — comes with the underlying support for individual self-acceptance.
Many may look at the event as held solely for survivors and the support systems for those survivors. Yet speaking in a college community — on a topic not often viewed as directly related to that campus community — allows that often overlooked facet of self-esteem in Lucas' memoir to come forward. Although the occurrence yearly becomes more and more common, not everyone will experience the very real threat of breast cancer.

Plenty will pass through a doctor's office visit without having to check the box indicating a family history of the disease. Plenty will never have to visit mothers, sisters or girlfriends in recovery rooms after mastectomies. Sooner or later, though, everyone experiences the pangs of disliking a perceived physical flaw, a seeming structural inadequacy.
This is where Lucas' message comes into clear focus for a broader audience. Breast cancer often leaves survivors with scars as despised as the bump from a broken nose or the marks from a nasty childhood burn. Just like the hockey puck that broke the nose or the boiling water that seared the skin, breast cancer does not define the individual. There is so much more.
Undeniably, the lecture will focus primarily on the experiences surrounding breast cancer. Let this not be a deterrent. With her optimism and enthusiasm, the topic will only be a medium through which Geralyn Lucas brings her story of self and survival to which anyone can relate.