Day 23 of Run 31, and today’s mile belongs to Deb – who came through it, and then used her own microphone to make the scary stuff ordinary.

Listen to Deb’s story

Worth your five minutes – Allan declares himself the ultimate estrogen blocker about halfway through. Player not loading? Listen on SoundCloud ›

Four sentences

That’s how long it takes Deb to tell you what happened to her. Routine exam. Caught it early. Surgery, radiation, and the estrogen blockers she will happily tell you she dreaded.

We’ve heard a version of this a few times now this month – women apologizing for how short their story is, as if an early catch somehow doesn’t count. It counts. Four sentences is what it sounds like when the system works, and the only reason Deb’s version is four sentences long is that she went in for the routine exam.

That’s the whole thing. That’s the entire difference between a four-sentence story and the other kind.

Then she talked about all of it, out loud, on the radio

Here’s why Marla nominated her.

When Deb was on the air at KISM, she talked about her own medical appointments. Her mammogram. Her colonoscopy. The tests most of us treat as private at best and dread at worst. She did them, and then she told everybody listening that she’d done them.

That’s a choice. Nobody required it of her. She could have kept every bit of it to herself and no one would have thought twice. Instead she handed it to an entire listening audience, on purpose, because she knew somebody out there was putting theirs off.

Why that matters more than it sounds like it should

Fear of a test keeps more people out of the clinic than the results ever do. The appointment feels like a big deal. The machine sounds intimidating. Nobody in your life talks about having done it, so it stays in the category of things that happen to other people.

Then somebody you hear every morning mentions hers like it’s a dentist appointment, and the whole thing shrinks down to a normal size.

That’s the work Deb was doing. Her nominator, Marla, put it exactly right:

“She did all the testing to make sure she was paying attention to her health, encouraging others to do the same. And she made it less scary and more normal. She never gives up on her health.”

Which is the whole point of this month

Everything we’ve done in October comes down to the same thing Deb was already doing on her own show – saying it out loud until going in feels normal. The miles, the stories, the mammogram reminders. All of it is just a louder version of what Deb was doing with a few sentences between songs.

Deb, today we run for you. Thank you for going first, and for making it look easy so the rest of us would follow.

Run for them. Get screened for you.

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