Philosophical questions

First off - well done to Facebook, who have decided that they will put back Anna Antell's pictures - story here. Although - forgive my cynicism - it all seems terribly familiar. There was this little story from last year where - guess what - a breast cancer survivor posted pictures of her surgery, and FB decided they were "offensive" and removed them. There's a report here... Do you think there is a pattern developing? Where they just steamroller along doing this and only when there's a huge outcry do they say "Oops, sorry, haha!" and undo whatever they did?
Get it together FB, please, sort out your filtering and get it right first time. Thank you.

So anyway, to a more philosophical musing... what constitutes bravery then?
To me, bravery requires a couple of components. There needs to be fear and a choice. If you don't have a choice, then can doing the scary thing be considered brave? I don't really think so. So I think that someone who does something that really scares them when they don't have to is brave. But what constitutes a choice? Does the mother who sees her child in the way of an oncoming lorry have any choice about whether she risks herself to drag him back? You tell me.

People have said I have been brave in the way that I have dealt with cancer. They see that bravery in the way I have usually appeared to be cheerful and positive (they didn't see the black times!), in the way that I have talked to people about cancer - getting my girlfriends to feel the lump so that they would know what to look for, the way I have talked on this blog about the way that the treatment has affected me.

Some of those things don't hit my definition of bravery because they weren't scary. Talking to people about cancer in general hasn't been scary - in many ways it's been cathartic, but often it's been essential - lots of my girlfriends have said that they feel their boobs but they have no idea what they are looking for. So showing them the lump and letting them feel it was easy for me to do and may help them save their own lives one day. Nothing scary about that. I don't have any particular problems with people seeing my body anyway, and within a fortnight of a breast cancer diagnosis my breasts had been seen and groped by half the NHS in Sussex!

Dealing with the treatment hasn't been brave. If I had had any kind of choice, then it would have been. If I go to the dentist to have a filling or a tooth out, I have a choice - I don't have to go. So that's pretty brave (for me at least). But going for chemo every third week? Not much choice there. Go, knowing it's going to make my hair fall out and mess up my tastebuds - or don't go - and die. It's that simple. Does that constitute a choice? Not to me it doesn't, I am not ready to die just yet, I have a boat to sail, grandchildren to spoil and a lot of living to do.

What I didn't have to do was post a picture of my battered boob yesterday. I thought long and hard before I did so. I was influenced by the amazingly brave women who chose to bare all for an exhibition and were deemed "offensive" by Facebook, and the woman last year who posted pictures of her surgery which suffered the same fate. I was influenced by the thought that many of the breast surgery pictures on the Internet show huge damage, which is frightening to people facing such an ordeal. I might be pretty cool about baring my body at the beach or at sea, but actually, (joking apart, IB1) there's something a bit odd about putting pictures of my naked boob where my baby brother and my daughter can see them... It would also be really embarrassing to be told that my picture is pornographic or offensive...
But then I thought - "sod it!" - and posted it anyway. So far, Blogger hasn't told me that my boob is offensive, which is nice. I have been told that it's a neat job, I will pass that onto the surgeon, who will I am sure be pleased... Hopefully people will look and think that it's not so bad, and that maybe they won't be so scared when they have to have a lump removed...
So, posting that was something I didn't have to do, and it was pretty scary. So I think that was pretty brave of me!