by Jennie Camp Hudgins

It’s nearly Christmas (and Hanukkah for my Jewish friends), and I’m thinking about springtime and blue hydrangeas! When January rolls around, Elizabeth and I will begin, in earnest, to promote this year’s Blue Hydrangea Tea Party event. We have adopted “Stir Up The Chatter!” as our theme for Blue Hydrangea Tea Party. Sort of a double entendre, I guess….a play on words. I hope that it will define our mission clearly enough that you will all want to chat up a storm about ovarian cancer awareness, as you would any good gossip! I can just see a group of ladies sitting around a lovely table, flamboyant in formal tea party attire, complete with hats and white gloves, stirring tea and chatting in hushed tones about what they saw the deacon’s wife doing on Sunday! Well, here’s an opportunity for those of you who enjoy exercising your gift of hospitality AND for those of you who have a need to be in the circle and not miss out on the latest chatter. And, if ever “good” and “gossip” could be used together, this is it….Spreading the word about ovarian cancer awareness is good gossip!

Ladies, in the spirit of good gossip, I won’t bore you with statistics, but trust me when I say, “The numbers don’t look good.” Why? Because ovarian cancer is difficult to diagnose in its early stages…It is rarely caught before it has metastasized to other areas within the body – other organs can become secondary sites for cancer and make beating it a constant struggle. Here is another secret: Pap smears do not detect ovarian cancer; they detect cervical cancer. How do we detect ovarian cancer? These days everyone’s abuzz with “the symptoms list.” “Symptoms?” you say. These symptoms include gastrointestinal-type symptoms. Hopefully, your doctor would never send you away with unresolved GI symptoms without a follow-up for ovarian cancer. Shhhhh…..Another secret is that they might….Ooops. Would you question the wisdom of your doctor? You would if you knew that, in the past, before the symptoms list, they might not have associated these symptoms with ovarian cancer. Ahhh, but this is the kind of thing the ovarian cancer awareness groups have been working on for years! This is just the kind of knowledge and information you would not know, if it weren’t for these wonderful agencies that we are raising money to support! They have been using this list long before it was officially adopted, so women who have been enlightened by these educational agencies have had this information for awhile now. This wasn’t a secret to be kept. Women trust the advice of other women, so woman to woman: Take control of your own health and request what you need to keep yourself healthy. Now, share this advice with a few of your friends and help bring other women into the circle of awareness.

And, while you are at it, share another secret about ovarian cancer, so that women will learn what isn’t known about this disease….Researchers haven’t quite figured out a way to detect this cancer early. For most women, it is a secret that we don’t have a screening tool to detect ovarian cancer in its early stages….Confused? Translation: Yes, we have NO screening tool! Women need to know that we have so much more to learn about ovarian cancer….There’s a long road ahead for us to get to the same level of awareness and screening abilities as breast cancer. While there are breast cancer patients still losing the battle, women have the opportunity for screening for breast cancer that they don’t have with ovarian cancer. As our collective voice gets louder, our needs will be heard more and more and won’t be such a secret! So, be part of the growing voice for ovarian cancer needs. Share these “secrets” with your friends….We need a screening tool! We can’t afford to wait for the symptoms! We need research!

Thankfully, our awareness agencies work for more research, as well as, awareness of symptoms. So, by funding them, we fund their ability to promote research. Please contact the local office of the ovarian cancer awareness agency you choose to support with your Blue Hydrangea Tea Party, and they will happily provide literature and awareness paraphernalia for your tea party guests. However, you may prefer to take a more direct route. We can help you find a research facility to support, if you’d like to exercise that option. Also, this year, we would like to provide each of our hostesses with Blue Hydrangea Tea Party brochures/bookmarks to be distributed to their guests, so please provide a mailing address when you register.

Plan to break out the white gloves and good china on May 10th, 2008 as you bring other women into the circle of awareness and stir up the chatter about ovarian cancer with Blue Hydrangea Tea Party!

Check out the Party Profiles section of our blog to read the personal stories of our tea party hostesses!