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When Erin Smith Chieze received Facebook messages from friends as part of a “game” to raise awareness of breast cancer, she wasn’t inspired, but frustrated.
“PLEASE, stop playing games that do not actually promote awareness, they often cause people to tune out anything that might even mention the word awareness,” she wrote in a lengthy Facebook post later that day.
Seeing all the red hearts that people were sending via Facebook meant very little to Chieze, a woman who has been diagnosed with breast cancer. “We need to give REAL information, not cute hearts,” she insisted.
At the bottom of her post, she tacked on this photo of lemons – an image she said “truly did make a difference for [her].”
Corrine Ellsworth Beaumont, for the Worldwide Breast Cancer organization, created this lemon image to teach women and men how to recognize signs of breast cancer for themselves.
Lumps aren’t the only detectable sign of breast cancer. Anything from veins, indentations, or even just dimpling can be symptoms of something more sinister in your body.
For Chieze, seeing this photo made her realize the indentation in her breast was not something that she could continue to pass off. Because she hadn’t felt the common bump in her breast, she hadn’t gone to the doctor.
Identifying her symptom by one of the lemons in the image finally prompted her to seek medical attention. Chieze was diagnosed five days later with stage 4 breast cancer.
She hasn’t provided any further updates on her condition, but she ends her post by writing, “If you truly want to help people WITH cancer, or those who will GET cancer, share photos like this one. I wish I remembered who posted the original picture I saw, it truly did make a difference for me.”
