GRANITEVILLE — Wearing pink T-shirts and ribbons, Aiken Technical College students, faculty and staff showed their support Wednesday for breast cancer awareness.
As part of the college's annual Pink Day, nursing students provided information about breast cancer at tables that lined the hall in the Student Activities Center. October is Breast Cancer Awareness Month.
“The purpose of today is to make the faculty, staff and students a little bit more aware of what's going on with breast cancer,” said Evelyn Pride, ATC's manager for Student Outreach and Development. “We want to let them know how serious it is and how important it is to get checked and to understand the symptoms and signs so perhaps they can prevent the cancer from spreading and save a life.
“Just a little bit of information could save a life. Sometimes, you think you know, but you really don't know. Just to be able to walk by a table and look at some of the symptoms and the signs could actually save a life. If there is anything we can do to help do that, then all the better.”
Alexa McNerlin, a nursing student at Aiken Technical College, pledges Wednesday to support all breast cancer survivors during the school's annual Pink Day to promote breast cancer awareness.
Mercy Workman, a second-semester nursing student from Aiken, and some of her classmates shared some of the risk factors for breast cancer as part of a poster presentation for their Maternity and Women's Health Care class.
Genetic testing is one way for people to determine their risk for breast cancer, especially for people with a history of the disease in their families, Workman said.
“Sometimes people already know if they have a genetic predisposition because maybe their mothers or grandmothers have had breast cancer,” she said.
Other factors that put people at risk for breast cancer are alcohol consumption, tobacco use and obesity.
Those factors are “mutable,” Workman said, meaning they can be changed or altered by choices in a person's everyday life.
“We really want to get that information out to the community so they know what they can do in their daily lives to make changes to either prevent or postpone or get tested for breast cancer,” Workman said. “If people already have other risk factors besides the genetics, those are things they should already be working on because the genetic predisposition is already there. If you have one whammy, it's better to have one whammy versus three whammies, so if you have three whammies, at least knock out two of them.”
Breast cancer awareness is important because the disease “affects so many people in the community,” Workman said.
“We just think it's a cause near and dear to a lot of people's hearts, so we're proud to represent Aiken Tech in order to share this information,” she said.
