My wife Arlene was a wonderful woman and we had a fabulous marriage. What can I say? She was just delightful. We enjoyed wine together. She didn’t drink a lot, but she drank some, and I collected wines.
Some studies say that too much wine causes increased cancer in women. While my wife lived to love life, she knew it was everything in moderation, and that’s what I have to say about that.
The news media jumps on all kinds of things, but I take it all with a grain of salt. If we eat too much salt, we’ll die. A year ago, if you ate too much butter, you died. Apples were going to kill us one year and watermelons would do us in the next. All those things are blown out of proportion. There is also research that shows that wine in small amounts is good for you and good for your heart.
Breast cancer, on the other hand, is very bad for the heart. When my wife was diagnosed with breast cancer it was frightening. She fought it for seven years and we were told that at the end of five years of her treatment, she would be cancer free. At the end of five years though, she had tumors on her brain and her liver and had bone cancer.
That was the big lie, and the more I think about it, the more I get upset. A lot of women are told lies during treatment. They’re not told that they could have it recurring sooner rather than later. There are a lot of things women aren’t told, and I believe if we’d been told more, my wife may have survived.
My mission is to provide information for women that their doctors don’t necessarily tell them. I want to give them a better chance to understand what they’re up against. Another major goal is to inspire women to believe that they can be beautiful and live to love life again.
Our beautiful, lovely models that have chosen to represent us all have similar stories to mine. When you read their stories you see tremendous variation in care that’s available to women. We’d like to level the playing field if they can.
I’m not a young man, but I love life every day. I try to inspire people to be happy - in particular survivors who don’t feel beautiful anymore. I don’t know quite what my wife would say if she could see what I did in her name, but I think she’d be quite happy about it.
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