It was the latest very public – and very bitter – turn in a story that has thrown the traditionally esteemed Komen foundation for one hell of a loop. Just one week ago, Planned Parenthood announced that Komen was halting its funding for the organization's breast cancer screenings.  The move, the Komen foundation insisted, was about "the charity’s newly adopted criteria barring grants to organizations that are under investigation by local, state or federal authorities" – itself a dubious smear on a respected women's health organization. But it didn't take long for critics to note that Handel, who was hired just last year, had run for governor of Georgia on a platform of conspicuously anti-Planned Parenthood rhetoric. In 2010, she declared "I do not support the mission of Planned Parenthood," and that she "strongly supports" laws prohibiting "the use of taxpayer funds for abortions or abortion-related services." A lady like that in the driver's seat of your organization just as you're distancing yourself from Planned Parenthood looks like a whole more than a coincidence.

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Practically since Roe v. Wade was decided in 1973, reproductive rights activists have been left to play stilted defense against ideological opponents who grabbed the language of morality, life, love and family as their own, always deploying it with reference to the fetus. The rhetoric around reproductive rights, which has more recently begun to creep into arguments over contraception, has become suffocating in its emotional self-righteousness, but too muscular, too ubiquitous to effectively combat.

But the overreach by the Komen foundation, while surely intended to strike yet another blow on the side of antiabortion activism, succeeded instead in waking a powerful constituency -- armed with precisely the language and emotional heft they’ve been lacking for too long.

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She was so excited, in fact, that she forgot that the decision was NOT ABOUT ABORTION WHATEVER GAVE YOU THAT IDEA. Later she posted that hilarious YouTube video of Komen CEO Nancy Brinker explaining that the Planned Parenthood decision was not in any way political, no sir. (At least one commenter noted the disconnect: "Really curious what K-Lo thinks Komen is actually doing here. When the news broke, she seemed pleased and pointed out right-to-lifers had been trying to force Komen to shuck PP. But she also believes Komen's [ridiculous] assertion that the decision has nothing to do with politics and was just a big coincidence? Hunh?")

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Within minutes on that Tuesday bombshell, the tale had become not just a news story but a social media explosion, with a flurry of responses pouring out across Facebook, Twitter and Komen's own message boards – overwhelmingly disapproving of Komen for the Cure's severing of its ties to Planned Parenthood. And in the process, it became an object lesson in how to handle a crisis, how to make it worse, and then how to fix it.

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Yet when the news broke Tuesday that Komen was ending its funding for Planned Parenthood breast cancer screenings and services, the organization's eagerness to throw Planned Parenthood – and the women who depend upon it – under the bus wasn't surprising. It's actually thoroughly unshocking for this venerated organization to pull such a crass, insensitive move.

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"It's always wrong, that's obvious, but I'm rolling my eyes at all the attention she'll get."

While covering the Egyptian protests back in February, CBS reporter Lara Logan was separated from her crew and endured a horrifying sexual and physical assault. And when the news filtered out from Tahrir Square, New York University Center for Law and Security fellow Nir Rosen fired off a torrent of scathing tweets about the attack, admitting "She's so bad that I ran out of sympathy for her," and adding "it would have been funny if it happened to Anderson [Cooper] too." In the wake a furious backlash, Rosen swiftly deleted the tweets, apologized for his words, and resigned from NYU. Today, he's back on Twitter after a brief sabbatical, but as he wrote for Salon last winter, "with 480 characters I undid a long career."

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Rancic has made a career of destigmatizing tough – and often taboo -- health issues. She's chronicled her fertility struggles, a miscarriage and multiple rounds of IVF on"Giuliana & Bill." That quest to become a mother is a big part of her decision to take an aggressive line on cancer. Speaking on the "Today" show Monday, Rancic explained that an earlier double lumpectomy had not been entirely effective, and why she's taking more drastic action.

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I sat shirtless in the oversize, faux leather examining chair as he eyed the twin slits remaining on my chest four weeks after the mastectomy. I slipped a C-cup silicone breast prosthesis out of one side of the bra I’d worn into the office. “I used to be an A-cup. Can you match this?”

He palmed the three-dimensional, triangular blob and then pressed it against one of my incisions using the tips of his fingers to hold it in place. “I don’t see why not. You’re tall – you can carry any volume you want. Let’s go with a 350cc.”

He wheeled backward on his stool, opened a drawer and pulled out a crescent-shaped expander. I liked him immediately. He seemed practical, matter-of-fact in the wake of my cancer, the way I hoped in my best moments to be. He explained the surgery would involve placing two of these filled with saline in my chest to begin stretching the skin and muscle to shape mounds that would eventually house the implants.

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October has long been a veritable minefield of raunch and innuendo. For years,  we've gritted our teeth as Halloween has morphed from a festive, candy-getting opportunity into our National Day of Dressing Up Like Slutty Nurses. Now an opportunity to promote and encourage women's healthcare has deteriorated into a thinly veiled opportunity for ogling. Welcome to Sweater Meat Fest 2011. I mean, Breast Cancer Awareness month.

The wink-wink effect will always surround anything to do with such a fascinating, beautiful and powerfully erotic body part. But wasn't Breast Cancer Month sufficiently appalling when it jumped the shark into a big branding opportunity, a chance to doll up merchandise in pink and make a buck? Does it really now additionally have to be skanky? Not to mention tacky?

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It comes in the form of a wig.

Not just any old wig, a beautiful, custom-made, human hair wig that fit perfectly over my smooth bald head for nearly a year, giving the false impression to the world that I was in good health with my own mane of beautiful blond hair.

When a friend was diagnosed (the first in a series of six friends in four years since my diagnosis), I offered it to her as a gift that she could keep, pass on, throw away or burn, for all I cared. 

She gladly accepted it.  I was exuberant to let it go, like excess weight falling off my body, making me feel lithe, agile and aloft.

Within days it showed up on my doorstep with a note. "Sorry, it didn’t fit."

I held it cautiously like a snake I might pick up with a long, sturdy stick to keep it far from me until it could be tossed back into the woods where it belonged.

I could donate it to the American Cancer Society or just stuff it in the trash can, for that matter.  I don't have to keep it, but old wives' tales run through my head like, "If you get rid of it, you’ll need it." Or, "If you keep it, you’ll never need it again."

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 I knew that once I settled in New York, I would become assimilated into his family -- a large, Jewish, Ivy League-educated, highly bonded collection of people with no shortage of opinions or emotions. By contrast, I had two brothers, each addicted to his own brand of drugs and a widowed sister. My mother had gotten as far as fifth grade; my father, who died of alcoholic cirrhosis, was a graduate of trade school. I was ready to move on and begin a new life with nothing but a stuffed suitcase.

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When I began blogging, I had been in remission from cancer for a whopping four weeks. I still wore scarves and baseball caps, but I was out of the house and doing stuff for the first time since my 52 weeks of chemotherapy and Herceptin, eight weeks of radiation, and recovery from what I thought at the time was the most serious surgery I would ever have. 

I'd pressed my oncologist for surgery during a winter break from work. She'd replied, "But if you have the full course of chemo before surgery and radiation your chances of living five years increase to 37 percent." Those were grim odds.

That Christmas, I kept looking at my kids and running into my bedroom to cry: I wouldn't see the little one past the age of 10, I might not even see the older daughter graduate high school. I went a little crazy after that.

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I'm a happily married 42-year-old woman with an 8-year-old son. So how did I end up inside the bathroom of a downtown brew pub with my face in all those knockers, the bare breasts of a group of women I'd just met, with our shirts up and bras hoisted? All the stroking and pressing and gazing might sound like fodder for Penthouse forum. 

Actually, we're all breast cancer patients and survivors.

Last summer, I had a mastectomy. I finished chemotherapy two weeks ago. December and the beginning of the new year will be filled with holiday celebrations -- and daily radiation. Currently, my left breast is stuffed with a rigid, plastic, saline-filled chest-expander, a space holder for my future silicone implant. The surgical swap out will happen next summer, after radiation is completed, and my skin has healed for the requisite six months.

How I long for a breast with a little softness and droop to it. How I look forward to having a breast that you'd want to have some fun with, not something you try not to bonk into. I don't exactly love having one perky, overly firm, scarred, bolt-upright breast and one natural, low-slung, post-nursing breast that I can practically tuck into my jeans. But I'll take these mismatched breasts any day. I'm alive, and I'm thankful.

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The new study comes by way of Sweden, where some counties provide screenings to women in their 40s and some do not; researchers compared breast cancer deaths between those two populations and found that women were 26 percent less likely to die from breast cancer in the former group. This led Jennifer C. Obel of the American Society for Clinical Oncology to tell the New York Times that women should "speak to their doctors about mammograms" once they hit 40.

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But, you know what? I'm offended by the bracelets, too -- just for a very different reason.

A growing number of activist campaigns are attempting to raise awareness (and perhaps other things) by simplifying the fight against breast cancer as a fight to save breasts. Not people, but breasts. Of course the implication is that lives will also be saved, but "boobies" are treated as the real star of this show. There was the infamous "Save the Boobs" ad, with a pair of bouncing bikini-clad breasts; the Men for Women Now campaign, which features famous(ly fratty) male celebs waxing poetic about breasts; the push for women to reveal the color of their bra in a Facebook status update; and the Booby Wall -- just to name a few. 

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My wife's father was good with tools. You could give Ron a pile of leaves and a ball peen hammer and get back a new deck or those cabinets you wanted in the master bathroom. Give me a tile saw, a pile of tile and a perfect square to lay them down and you wouldn't get a recognizable pattern on the floor even if I was given all of geological time.

Now she's complaining about my driving but I'm not listening. I'm actually a very good driver, though I occasionally have premature turnage. I turn too early. I've tried thinking about baseball and rare birds but I can't help it. 

We drive into the hot-tub store, one stop too early, and I try to fake it, suggesting that maybe we ought to look at hot tubs, but Terry points out that we already have a hot tub and it works just fine and I suggest it's never too soon to think about replacing it given the new Oxygenators that self-clean but she's heard these sorts of creative noises before. I have to navigate the minivan in a K-turn so that we can pull back out into traffic (while she sighs loudly) and into the home store lot which is an awkward sort of live-with-your-screw-up-for-a-while experience. 

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It's devastating. It's deplorable. It's other dramatic adjectives as well — but the most frightening one of all is that it is common.

How does it happen?

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You might ask whether there's a better way to allocate resources -- or at least that's the question doctors Jeanne Mandelblatt and Diana Buist raise in an editorial in the Journal of the National Cancer Institute (PDF). Given contradictory evidence as to the effectiveness of regular mammograms, the recent recommendation against regular screening for women in their 40s, the risk for false negatives, false positives and overdiagnosis, and the aforementioned suckiness of intervention attempts, we might be better off spending money on new, more effective screening methods. "It could be reasonably argued that we should better spend our efforts in discovering better early detection tests rather than continuing to invest in getting a few more women to regularly use a flawed technology," they write.

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