It takes a team to battle breast cancer. 

All of you are part of that team. In fact it takes many teams — medical teams, research teams, social support teams, teams of family, philanthropic teams, and all all of you as soccer teams. Seventeen soccer teams are playing in this tournament for a life saving cause. Thank you.

It takes a team to battle breast cancer.

Yet battling breast cancer is not a competition. The only competition is to see if we can do more to prevent breast cancer, to educate the community on early detection, and to support cutting edge research and top notch treatment.

Battling breast cancer is not a competition of teams but a collaboration of local and global teams to race for the cure… and how far we have come.

All of us who have battled breast cancer or who are battling breast cancer are part of the same team. We are cheering each other on. 

It was a mid-June day in 2020, when much of the country was facing a COVID lockdown, that I was diagnosed.  I was attending an online racial justice conference and my attendance at the conference was interrupted four times in one day by a call from the breast imaging office asking me to return; by a diagnostic mammogram; by an ultrasound, and by a biopsy – all in one day. In those early days of COVID, I was one of few visiting medical facilities.  It was not the day I expected but the day I got.

With an airpod in one ear listening to sessions on racial and economic divides and potential paths towards healing them and a person at a desk asking me in my other ear to pay many hundreds of dollars for the biopsy before getting the test that would confirm my cancer, I immediately asked myself, “How do those without insurance or those living paycheck to paycheck walk this same road?”

And I immediately promised myself, even before a confirmed diagnosis, that I would do what I could to be part of a team that would ensure others would have the same access to great medical teams that I had. Today is a step toward fulfilling that promise. 

How moved I was this morning, how humbled I was this morning, how stunned I was this morning to see the banner with the names of all who gave in my honor.  I could not believe all the donors who gave today as part of my team of battling breast cancer for all in our community. 

Thank you Talia Goldman for being the captain of our team to ensure the greatest possible chance of survival from breast cancer. Your work is amazing and inspires immense awe and gratitude.

I learned that battling breast cancer is all about statitics.  Each treatment and each path is determined by statistics – of effectiveness of treatments and of survival rates. 

But here’s what I know, statistically, when we work as one team, we have the best chance of helping all those confronting breast cancer to win their battle against it.

Thank you for being part of this team.