Cogs can think.

Yesterday evening, I sent out the following email to my closer friends, in Dutch. I translated it to English just now.

As some of you may know, my mum suffered from breast cancer last year. Aside from having had chemo and radiation therapy, she also had a breast removal operation.

Even though my mother is now ‘cancer-free’, and even though she passed all check ups fine, she now does have to live with the fact she is missing one breast. This is hard to grasp; you’ll only be able to understand something like this if you’re in the same situation.

Anyway, one of the problems which my mother, and other breast cancer patients, face is that they cannot buy normal lingery. It’s all the same, (’meat colour’, as my mum says), and it’s everything but pretty or sexy. Lingery saleswomen handle the matter as if its a pariah, ‘underneath the counter’ and in ‘backrooms’. Even though I understand little of this matter as a man (I’m scared like a child in the dark in lingery shops), I do understand my mother misses the ‘normal’ lingery shopping.

Not to scare the women reading this, but 1 out of 9 women gets breastcancer, hence, shouldn’t it be possible for lingery designers and salespeople to take them into account as being normal people?

Well, my mother thinks so too, and thus she came up with the idea of emailing Dutch TV host Paul de Leeuw, who in his nationwide TV show ‘Mooi! Weer De Leeuw’ (1.2 million viewers, which is 8% of the country) makes people’s wishes come true; whether it be feeding a pengiun (I kid you not) or more serious matters, like that of my mother. Note for international readers: Paul de Leeuw is a very famous Dutch TV host and singer. He has a very confrontational style.

And she got invited. A lot of things have been prepared by De Leeuw’s staff, i.e. my mother had to send in her sizes. We haven’t a clue as to what is going to happen, but coming Saturday, 14th of October, my mother will be on ‘Mooi! Weer De Leeuw’, 20:30, Nederland 1 (and the follow-up the next day, 23:10).

If you have the time, I would love if you’d watch. I’m extremely proud of my mother, because in front of a million+ audience, she’ll be talking about some very difficult matters, and with it, help bring a very big problem into the forefront.

Rests me to say all is very well with my mother at the moment, and she is currently close to working full time again.

I wish you all a nice weekend,

Grandpa Thom