My pink October

October is the Pink Ribbon month that promotes Breast Cancer Awareness and Early Detection, and it’s just a couple of days into November. So I’d like to do a recap of two of the Pink events which were special occasions of a personal nature.

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The first one was the annual Estée Lauder Philippines Breast Cancer Campaign event for 2025. Part of a global campaign that was founded in 1992 by the late Evelyn Lauder, this is the company’s largest corporate social impact program. The campaign promotes ‘Breast Care Is Self-Care’, championing lifesaving breast health measures as part of everyday wellness routines. It also advocates Breast Cancer prevention and early detection, to increase chances of survival; acknowledging the fact that several breast cancer risk factors cannot be avoided or controlled. And that’s especially important here in the Philippines, where mortalities from breast cancer is still the highest in the ASEAN region.

Even if I was booked on a flight to the Frankfurt Buchmesse later in the evening, I attended this afternoon event because invited to be resource persons on one segment of the program were Cesca Litton-Kalaw and her sister, Issa Litton. Cesca had just finished her chemotherapy treatment for herbreast cancer; and was kind and brave enough to share her experience - in the hope that it would guide and inspire the young women in the audience not to take self-examinations, and annual mammograms, lightly.