A Cancer Survivor's Defiant Statement

There's nothing funny about a 27-year-old woman being diagnosed with breast cancer.

But then you haven't met Geralyn Lucas.

Lucas was working at ABC's "20/20" when she discovered a lump during a breast self-examination. Despite favorable odds -- and doctors' assurances that the lump was nothing to worry about -- she was diagnosed with breast cancer. Lucas, now director of public affairs at Lifetime Television, wrote about her experience in the book "Why I Wore Lipstick to My Mastectomy." It's a sobering yet irreverent and humorous look at her journey from diagnosis to mastectomy to breast reconstruction.

"I just realized how badly I needed this book and how badly I needed this voice," Lucas, now 39, said. "The media seemed to focus on every maudlin, horrible story of every woman who died from breast cancer. I just needed the story. Just saying it's okay to laugh is such an important message. What I love about it is taking the taboo away."

But Lucas never could have imagined that her story would become a TV movie.

"When I wrote the book I thought, 'Okay, I'll be happy if one person reads this.' At my first speaking event they told me 500 people were going to show -- and one person showed up. She had traveled five hours to meet me. I thought, 'Okay, God is playing a little trick on me here. I wrote the book to reach one woman, and here she is."

The "Lipstick" title is literal: Lucas, who gave birth to her second child in April, wore bright red lipstick into her surgery as an outward symbol of her inner courage -- a representation of her determination to fight the disease and have a future.

"She's so gutsy and strong in the choices she made throughout," said Sarah Chalke ("Scrubs"), who portrays Lucas. "The movie does the reverse of what you would assume and kind of takes the fear out of it for women."

Chalke said the story touched her personally because she's lost an aunt and a grandmother to cancer. "I had done a self-exam once, until I did this part -- and now I do them all the time," Chalke said. "I think that, as women, we put our health last very often. You worry about everyone else and not yourself."

Lucas, who appears as an extra in the movie with her mother, had interest in making her story into a big-screen feature film but decided to go with Lifetime -- and not just because she works at the network, she said.

"What's kind of amazing about Lifetime is just the whole advocacy campaign they have around breast cancer and just the reach that they have," Lucas said. "I knew I could never get anything like that with a feature film. And I knew that the people who actually had to go pay to see a movie about breast cancer would be a very self-selecting audience.

"I really hope it can actually be life-saving," Lucas said of the production. "I think that was the goal of the movie, to try and do something a little bit different so it wouldn't be as scary and difficult to watch."

Although the movie is filled with laughter, playing Lucas is Chalke's most dramatic role to date, and the physical transformation her character experiences during the course of the movie is jarring.

"I had three different wigs for different stages of hair loss, and I felt like I was looking at my aunt when she was going through her chemo," Chalke said. "It can't help but bring you back to those experiences in your life, so that was tough."

The movie is the centerpiece of Lifetime's 12th annual "Stop Breast Cancer for Life" campaign during October, which is National Breast Cancer Awareness Month. While shows such as "Grey's Anatomy" recently featured a breast cancer story line, and Ellen DeGeneres made the subject the focus of a recent episode of her talk show, Lifetime is unique in its comprehensive approach to the topic.

Besides public service announcements that will air throughout October, the network's Web site (www.lifetimetv.com) features "tools of detection" e-cards and an online petition to put an end to "drive-through" mastectomies, in which patients are sent home very soon after surgery. The network also is sponsoring screenings in Atlanta, San Francisco, New York and Los Angeles and has partnered with Zeta Tau Alpha sorority to host viewing parties of "Lipstick" on college campuses nationwide.

"I think Lifetime does it because they can," Lucas said. "It's the right thing to do. They have this direct connection with women, and the results that they've seen have been just phenomenal. The great thing about a good story is you lose yourself and suspend disbelief and you think, 'Is this happening to me? Could it happen to me?'"

For Lifetime, creating awareness "has a lot to do with who our audience is, and our audience is women," said Meredith Wagner, executive vice president of corporate communications and public affairs. "Women care deeply about the world around them and making it better. Women are attracted to this kind of work that we're doing. It's a nice byproduct of entertainment."