Show your support?

Ah-hem. If you were on Facebook this past Friday, you probably saw some “colorful” conversations. Here’s a synopsis, in brief:

“Purple.”
“Green.”
“Black, of course!”
“Maroon with a pretty pink design.”
“Tan.”
“Beige.”
“Magenta.”

Turns out women of every stripe and hue were posting the color of the bra they were wearing at that moment. A bit of online exhibitionism? Not exactly. Evidently, the game was launched anonymously to raise awareness of breast cancer -- although a good many women didn’t know they were doing that.

Still, the cyber-peek caught on fast, sweeping across Facebook in hours. And at least one foundation did benefit.

The Washington Post got to the heart of the matter in a story that ran yesterday, "Breast cancer awareness goes viral on Facebook":

“It was no game to the people at the Susan G. Komen Breast Cancer Foundation, who were stunned to find themselves the beneficiaries of a Web phenomenon they didn't begin to understand. At the start of Friday, they had exactly 135 fans on their Facebook page. By 5:30 in the evening, they had 135,000.”

Donations to the foundation were up, too.

And it wasn’t just here in the States. Teasing, I posted this on my Facebook status Friday: “Black. What’s the question? ;-)”

Within minutes I had a reply from une amie in Caen, France: “Just to inform you that the question is ‘what color are your underwears’ ... ;-)”

Here’s another story, from The Telegraph in the U.K.: "Facebook 'bra colour' status update craze 'raising breast cancer awareness'."

It seems women everywhere were more than happy to offer a virtual glimpse of their unmentionables for a good cause.

I wish I could come up with something that clever to focus attention on childhood cancers. A lot of money has been raised to fund breast cancer research because grassroots efforts like the Facebook bra reveal have been phenomenal -- and effective.

A year ago I took a science-medical writing class through Johns Hopkins University's master's in writing program, called Medicine in Action. Each week of the semester, a prominent physician or public health expert spoke to us about the specific issues and challenges he or she faces every day.

A gynecological oncologist marveled at the level of organization behind the Race for the Cure, the pink ribbon campaigns, the 3-day walks and all the other efforts benefiting breast cancer research. If only that kind of effort could support all types of cancer, he said, we’d be finding cures faster.

The good news about childhood cancers is that they are rare. The bad news is that without a large population behind it to push for funding and research, childhood cancer isn’t going to get a lot of notice.

Not only is my son David's cancer one that predominately strikes children and young adults, but it’s also a sarcoma. Sarcomas, too, are relatively rare and, therefore, not that popular. As his oncologist David Loeb explained to us, not many researchers want to put the time and money into conducting clinical trials that will help only a small number of patients. So the development of treatments is slow. Add that to the fact that it’s difficult to run large trials when the pool of patients isn’t that deep to begin with.

It’s hard as a parent to realize that, even though your child is getting the best treatment available, that treatment might not be good enough. And one of the reasons it may not be good enough is because there aren’t enough sick kids for it to matter.

Maybe the question for anyone dealing with childhood cancer should be, "What color is your mood?"

My answer would be "blue."

© 2010 by Lorin D. Buck