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October is Breast Cancer Awareness Month. Local breast cancer survivors and health advocates are working to combat breast cancer mortality rates while supporting patients on their journey to healing from the degenerative disease.
Madeline Long, founder of MAD Konnect Foundation, an advocacy group for breast cancer recovery and patient advocacy support, still recalls the heaviness surrounding the death of a family friend who died from breast cancer. The silence and tip-toeing around their cause of death spawned her curiosity to learn more about the disease plaguing Black women at higher rates than their counterparts. Long began volunteering with the Susan G. Komen Foundation to learn more about breast cancer and contribute to support groups for women facing the aggressive disease.
Her advocacy turned out to be preparation for a season that she would soon enter in 2011, when her mother, aunt, and herself were all diagnosed with breast cancer. In hindsight, she found her path in volunteering to be the blessing that provided her exposure in this space, witnessing women’s needs and trials while battling the disease.
“I was fortunate to be in this space because I didn’t see breast cancer as a death sentence. So, I was able to help, especially my mother. My mother [told] me that she was waiting to die because she knew this is how it ends. And so for me, I was able to take the work that I was doing while working in advocacy and walking the halls of Congress for Susan G. Komen and others. I was able to bring that home,” Long told the Informer on an episode of WIN-TV’s “Let’s Talk.”
“Because of the way my mother was handling her diagnosis, it inspired me to open my organization, and that’s how we opened MAD Konnection Foundation,” Long emphasized.
According to the National Breast Cancer Foundation, Inc., 1 in 8 women across the United States will be diagnosed with breast cancer at some point in their lifetime. Estimates for 2023, are that “297,790 women and roughly 2,800 men will be diagnosed with invasive breast cancer.”
Black women have even more of a reason for heightened awareness. The American Cancer Society reports that Black women hold the “lowest five-year relative breast cancer survival rate compared to all other racial/ethnic groups for every stage of diagnosis and every breast cancer subtype.” Likewise, there stands a 6% to 8% gap in the five-year survival time window between Black and white women for every breast cancer subtype.
Long told the Informer that since she opened her doors in 2015, her foundation has taken great pride in providing women with patient advocacy to bolster emotional and physical support to those on this emotional journey. She emphasized that a significant number of women who lose their battle to breast cancer, but especially women of color, reside in underserved areas.
MAD Konnect Foundation provides patient advocacy support, from accompanying survivors to appointments, shopping for them, and texting them to keep connection, as some of the most difficult times for survivors are during the night as they lay alone with their thoughts while facing the disease.
“You never forget that moment when they tell you, ‘I’m sorry to tell you that you have breast cancer.’ We are in the lives of survivors from diagnosis to the end of life,” Long said.
“Because I was diagnosed two months after my mom, I didn’t have anyone to be with me, so patient navigation is very important to me,” Long continued. “There is nothing I won’t do for my sisters. We will not leave any sisters behind.”
Over the years, research points to breast cancer diagnosis affecting the lives of younger women as well, as African Americans under the age of 35 die from breast cancer three times as often as white women of the same age. Long wants to push outreach to women of all ages, while encouraging younger women to correct their ideologies about the illness and when they may be most susceptible to diagnosis.
“I plan to use [my] platform to reach out to younger women because younger women believe that breast cancer is an old women’s disease, and it’s not.”
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