October is Breast Cancer Awareness Month, among many other awareness months. September was Child Cancer Awareness Month. Seal Beach Police officers will wear the pink police patch to promote awareness of breast cancer.
I don’t need an awareness month for any cancer—it’s an old enemy. Stomach cancer killed my maternal grandfather, leaving my mother with a lifelong terror that it would kill her as well. (She once phoned me twice in 24 hours saying “this is goodbye” after a doctor told her she needed tests.) She died many years latter of an unrelated disease.
A journalism school classmate of mine named Eric had a malignant brain tumor while we were in college together. His treatment forced him to leave his Los Angeles Times internship early. The Times kept a slot open for him after he recovered. Unfortunately, the disease apparently came back and killed him.
When I was 38, I was diagnosed with stage 1 seminoma. After treatment (surgery and radiation), my life returned to normal. I’m 63 now.
A month before I was diagnosed, four of my stepmother’s friends in Leisure World were diagnosed with cancer. That’s probably part of the reason why she refused to believe my diagnosis. There is such a thing as too much bad news in too short a time.
A few months after I was treated for seminoma, I had a brief scare: I thought (incorrectly) that I might have male breast cancer. I was wrong—but it came within three months after I’d finished radiation therapy. I was briefly terrified.
The Johns Hopkins Medicine website reports 10,000 men get testicular cancer every year. There are more than 200,000 new cases of breast cancer every year, also according to Johns Hopkins. Most of the breast cancer patients are women.
A friend of my stepmother was a breast cancer survivor. She had a double mastectomy to keep her life.
In 2004, a year before I started freelancing for the Sun, then-Seal Beach Police Sgt. Steve Bowles was diagnosed with stage 2 melanoma (skin cancer). He survived to retire from law enforcement. Bowles reportedly proposed the idea of a pink Seal Beach Police patch to support breast cancer awareness and research. (I still remember then-SBPD Chief Joe Stilinovich saying, “Real men wear pink.”)
“The roots of the PPP”—that stands for Pink Patch Project—“can be traced to the Seal Beach California Police Department, who wore pink patches on their uniform shirts during ‘Breast Cancer Awareness Month’ in 2013,” according to pinkpatchproject.com.
“In 2015, the Irwindale California Police Department took the idea a step further and sold their patches to the community, raising over $20,000 for City of Hope,” according to pinkpatchproject.com.
Pancreatic cancer killed past Sun editor Dixie Redfearn.
On Aug. 20, 2025, pancreatic cancer killed my old journalism school pal Chuck Bennett.
I see ads for colorectal cancer testing on TV all the time.
I recently learned that someone else I know has cancer.
Cancer awareness we have a plenty. What I’d like to see is a cure or a vaccine or at least a test to catch the deadlier cancers sooner.
Charles M. Kelly is the associate editor of the Sun. He is also a grouch. His opinions are his own.
