Carolina Alumni Review - March/April 2010

ETTA PISANO
machines for many facilities and bring them
into the preventive health routines of more
women.

STEVE EXUM ’ 92

Etta Pisano may be her father’s daughter,
but she is her mother’s champion.

The fact is when a mother is taken away
from her family, whether from a breast can-
cer that couldn’t be screened in time or a
brain tumor that no one knew about, that
family is never the same. And Etta Pisano
still needed her mother. Ask any teenager
whose parent just doesn’t wake up one day.
They still have questions to ask, a legacy to
learn. Like, “Why would a talented electri-
cal engineer, a college graduate, a woman
running an office of 30 men in charge of
computerizing the telephone system in
1955 quit when she got married? Did they
make you, Mom? Or was it just what was
done?”
And, “Did you ever resent that?”
When a brain tumor takes away a 15-
year-old girl’s mother; when seven children
are left behind, and you’re the oldest, and

‘We don’t have
the urgency that
we should. It
took four years
just to get the
money to do ...

a study which
everyone agreed
was a no-brainer.
Then it took
another four
years to finish it.’

Etta Pisano
you have to take care of everybody; when
you’re suddenly sister and parent to a pre-
schooler; when you can’t even drive yet,
but three months later, on the day you get
your license, you’re handed the keys to a
Ford wagon and told you’re now the fam-
ily’s chauffeur …
“It was just so hard,” Pisano says,
unsteadiness quietly rocking her voice. “It
was very, very hard on my family. It’s just
… it’s one of the hardest things that any
family can go through, to lose a parent. It’s
one of the most devastating life events you
can go through.

The news last fall that a federally funded task force had advised against mammography screening for women in their 40s took Pisano by surprise. “Those recommendations seem very nonchalant about the worth of the lives we do save,” she said.