October Madness and News

As breast cancer awareness month is winding down, it's time to let out a big sigh of relief and also a huge woohoo of gratitude! The Pink Ribbon Shop has been crazy busy, October being our busiest month of the year, of course. We are blessed to have our little "mom and pop" online business, and we hope to this year make our biggest donation yet to MD Anderson Cancer Center. We are so excited to be a part of "Making Cancer History!" More details to come before this year's end...

It's also been tremendously encouraging to see the pink ribbon showing up in more and more places. Thank you, NFL! The NFL again this year promoted their "Crucial Catch" breast cancer awareness program by having all the players, coaches & refs wear hot pink wristbands, whistles, helmet stickers, cleats, hats, chin straps, mouth guards, etc! They widely promoted their pink ribbon fan gear with NFL game-time and website advertising, and a mail-out catalog. They again plan to auction off some of the pink items worn by the players. Can't wait to hear how much $$$ they raised for the American Cancer Society's breast cancer initiatives!


Our local high school football players wore The Pink Ribbon Shop's hot pink wristbands & armbands and/or shoelaces during their "pink out" breast cancer awareness games last weekend. (Go Kingwood Mustangs and K-Park Panthers!!) We contributed to the events by donating other pink ribbon items such as helmet stickers, wearable pink ribbons, pink ribbon tattoos, pink silicone wristbands and Find the Cure eyeblacks. Student-relative breast cancer survivors were recognized before the game (including me, mom of Christa! [Go KM4B!!]) which was pretty cool and a nice gesture by the high school. Hopefully a bunch was raised in donations! Want to find out how much was donated and where the donations went.

Speaking of football, with Danny being the head coach of my 9-year-old's little league football team, and my 14-year-old now in the high school band, our family has been living and breathing football for the past few months! Friday night high school football, Saturday little league football, and practices and game film review all week long is wearing us out! Lots of fun, but also lots of work and hard on our family time, but all worth it for the kids! Then when you add in Saints football on Sundays, well, just ... whew! We'll be relieved (and maybe a little sad) when the season ends. I'm sure there will be plenty to take football's place.


The Pink Ribbon Shop had about 10 seconds of celebrity on October 7th that was pretty darn exciting for this lifelong Jeopardy fan. A friend sent me an email (just last week) asking if I was aware that pinkribbonshop.com was part of a Jeopardy clue. I told him to not mess with me like that! Surely that couldn't be true! But he had snapped a picture (I can't thank you enough, David Bloom!!!) of his TV with the clue, right there in bold & bright Jeopardy blue: pinkribbonshop.com promotes awareness of this disease, "One pink ribbon at a time." It was a definitely an "O M G" moment! I mean, how cool is that?! I immediately headed to Google to verify that this actually happened. And sure enough, after finding the Jeopardy archives, there it was, a $200 clue in round 2 of the October 7, 2011 episode. My niece was then kind enough (Thank you, Mandy!) to locate the entire episode on YouTube (which, in my hyper excitement, didn't even cross my mind to do! duh!) And there was visual AND audio proof that it was, in fact, true. Alex Trebek spoke our business name! On TV! Of course all my work for the day ceased, as I had to call all of my immediate family and post all of the proof on our (and my personal) Facebook page. Truly amazing!

In other news ... I am scheduled to have my next round of tests/scans the week of Thanksgiving. I have been feeling pretty good, so I am expecting to receive good results! The new Xeloda dosage schedule that I've been on for about 3 months seems to be agreeing with me more than the previous one. The side effects are a bit more tolerable, although ugly. My hands are pretty disgusting looking, but I suppose a small price to pay to be able to lead such an active life with my active family. Hopefully my feeling good will translate to negative or improved findings :) ..... and hopefully I'm not sadly surprised that my cancer has shown growth or further metastasis. :(

That's about it for now. More news soon, promise! Thanks for reading.