I never used to like pink and now oddly it is one of my favorite colours. I gravitate towards it almost unconsciously. Pink T-shirts, nail polish, and even a few pink highlights in my hair for kicks. And then a recent trip to the shopping mall reminded me that October was National Breast Cancer Awareness Month . It shouldn’t come as a surprise since I am surrounded by a sea of pink. At the bank there are pink credit cards. At the drug store and supermarket there are pink energy drinks, pink ballpoint pens and pink yogurt lids. The pink ribbon, symbolic of the fight against breast cancer, is everywhere. I am receiving an inspiring flood of emails from organizations like Susan G. Komen, Young Survival Coalition and the Hong Kong Breast Cancer Foundation. Earlier this month I spent a weekend with a dozen plus young ladies (the 42 and under crew) who were either breast cancer survivors or current fighters. We were part of a Young Advocates Training with “Living Beyond Breast Cancer”, a U.S.-based non-profit organization that increases knowledge and awareness. We bonded over this disease, a similar fight, and were given some basics on how to take our stories to advocacy - how we could initiate change amongst legislators or to the news media. We learned that in order to create change we needed to share our own stories with the public, the press, and the public policy makers. There was much to fight for including more funding for research, for prevention, for state-of-the-art mammogram machines and access to those machines especially for underserved women. Could I possibly go from survivor to advocate, I wondered? A week after this weekend of training and making new friends, I had my six month date with my oncologist. After some banter on the latest in my life – yes, I was still swimming, still eating, and sleeping pretty well – we completed the exam and she literally gave me a thumbs up. “As far as I’m concerned you are cancer free, you only have a higher risk of cancer than other women your age,” she said. It was almost a greenlight to give my cancer chapter a nod, a bow and say farewell. But what about the ladies, the new friends, who I’d met throughout my journey and certainly over the weekend? The numbers that I’d learned about over the weekend stuck in my head. Breast cancer treatments have come a long way, but every year 40,000 women still die from the disease. In Hong Kong, breast cancer has become the most common cancer affecting women in Hong Kong since 1993, and female breast cancer cases diagnosed in Hong Kong tripled from 1,152 in 1993 to 3,419 in 2011. Indeed, there is much to celebrate but still much work to do. Happy National Breast Cancer Awareness Month.