The Vista Oct. 26, 2010

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Campus Quotes

Anorexia

Lean University

Barons Hockey

Who are you voting for in the elections and why?

Anorexia affects one in five females in America.

An internal training function at UCO to reduce costs.

Alexandre Giroux hitting stride for Oklahoma’s AHL team.

OCT. 26, 2010 uco360.com twitter.com/uco360

THE VISTA

UNIVERSITY OF CENTRAL OKLAHOMA’S student voice since 1903.

Breast Cancer Awareness

By Cody Bromley / Staff Writer A new military based video game is taking fire for naming the opposing forces as the Taliban. The game in question is Electronic Arts’ “Medal of Honor,” and is currently available on next generation consoles and computers. The game, which is loosely based on a 2002 Afghanistan military operation, had originally named the insurgent fighters as the Taliban. In a multiplayer mode, players could take control of the Taliban fighters to wage war against and kill U.S. forces. Amanda Taggart, senior PR manager for Electronic Arts, defended the developer’s inclusion of the name in an interview with AOL News. “Most of us having been doing this since we were seven: if someone’s the cop, someone’s gotta be the robber, someone’s gotta be the pirate and someone’s gotta be the alien,” Taggart said. “In ‘Medal of Honor’ multiplayer, someone’s gotta be the Taliban.” John Wood, a junior mechanical engineering and industrial safety major, has played several war-themed games and said the name makes the game more realistic, but that games have the potential to go over the line. “In the previous “Medal of Honors,” you could choose to be the Nazis. To me if you’re a Jewish person or if you’re not Jewish and you had a family member that was in the Holocaust, the way people negatively viewed Nazis is still kind of viewed that way,” Wood said. The line between reality and fantasy was too close for several branches of the military that banned retailers from stocking the game on military bases. This response caused Electronic Arts to change the name of the enemy team from “Taliban” to “Opposing Force.” Despite the name change, the military has not changed its position. Locally, Tinker Air Force base has a GameStop on its premises. An employee from the store named Keith confirmed over the phone that at their location they would not stock the game. In the same breath, he suggested a nearby GameStop off base that does carry the title. Officially, the branches of military have stated that the game can be purchased by service members off-site and brought back onto the base. Army and Air Force Exchanges commander Army Maj. Gen. Bruce Casella said that Army and Air Force exchanges would not carry the game “out of respect to those touched by the ongoing, real-life events presented as a game.” Still, other popular modern war titles, such as games from the “Battlefield” series and games from the “Call of Duty” series are still for sale at the GameStop at Tinker Air Force base. The big competition this holiday season for “Medal of Honor” is another first person shooter called “Call of Duty: Black Ops.” The “Call of Duty” series made its resurgence in June 2008 with the release of their new Modern Warfare franchise. The first game in the series broke several sales records, but those achievements are minimal compared to the success of its sequel. In the first five days of release for “Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2,” the game sold $550 million worth of copies in the United States and the United Kingdom combined. Comparatively, that launch beats any amount of money earned by a movie release in the same timeframe.

ZIMMERMAN WINNING THE FIGHT AGAINST BREAST CANCER PHOTO BY MARK ZIMMERMAN

PRESERVING ‘HONOR’ THROUGH CENSORSHIP

These photos were taken from a video shot by Mark Zimmerman as part of a graduate art project for the University of Oklahoma. Meredith Zimmerman (shown) said that shaving her head was, “liberating.” Her chemotherapy treatments began after she was diagnosed with triple negative breast cancer June 7.

By Ryan Costello / Senior Staff Writer This summer was supposed to be easy. The workload of a pair of university employees, Meredith Zimmerman an administrative secretary for the UCentral Media department, and her husband Mark Zimmerman, a photography instructor on campus and graduate student in fine arts, is typically lighter in the summer than in the hustle and bustle months of spring and fall semester. It was supposed to be a time for them to breathe. But it wasn’t. First, their family dog of thirteen years died, but that was just the beginning of what Mark describes simply as, “a stressful summer.”

At a recent doctor visit, Zimmerman was told not to have a mammogram until she was 40 years old, the typical advice given to a patient. In June, however, Zimmerman found a lump in her right breast about the size of a pea. She immediately scheduled a mammogram, but was still confident, as was Mark, that it would turn out to be nothing. So much so that Mark had not initially planned to accompany Meredith to the scan until the two agreed just before the appointment that he would be there to share the good news that all was well. The doctor was not as sure. “You could tell she wanted to tell me it wasn’t cancer, but she knew it was,” Meredith said. “She also said on the mammogram there were calcifications, which knowing quite a bit already about breast cancer, calcifications don’t mean anything good.” The initial scan and biopsy was Friday, June 4, but the two would not get any results confirmed until the following Monday. Throughout the weekend, Meredith stayed her typical selfpositive. It was not until Sunday evening that the nerves began to seep in. Meredith will be celebrating her 37th birthday in November. Her aunt died from breast cancer at the age of 37. “At one point [Sunday evening], Mark was helping me change the sheets on the bed, and he was like, ‘How are you doing?’ and I said, ‘Funny you should ask, because I feel like I want to throw up,” Meredith said. She heard the news, as if being read her sentence, on June 7; She had what was called triple negative breast cancer, an aggressive and difficult to identify cancer that at her age and race, Meredith said she had only a 10 to 15 percent chance of developing. “You immediately know that your life’s never going to be the same… and it’s definitely not,” she said. Over the next several weeks, Meredith saw a succession of doctors for different reasons. She had a mastectomy performed on her right breast, and was prepared for the rounds of chemotherapy she would have to endure. “You kind of get worked through the program,” Meredith said. “After your surgery, you’re set up to get a port put in, which is a way for them to give you chemo, but that’s actually under your skin in your body,” Meredith said, thumbing at the device, the shape of which is barely visible buried just above her left breast. The port is used to draw blood, and to feed the mélange of chemotherapy drugs into the body. Doctors also removed a pair of lymph nodes from her right arm to see if the cancer had spread. That was when the first good word came; the cancer was in the earliest of stages, and was still isolated. But with the good, there was even more difficult news. A PET scan showed that Meredith had a nodule on her thyroid, a growth that she would later learn was also cancerous. Still, even after the surreal surgeries and treatments, Meredith had hopes that it was all a mistake.

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Media

WEATHER TODAY

H 71° L 46°

PLANNED PARENTHOOD: BIRTH CONTROL MATTERS By Christie Southern / Contributing Writer

TOMORROW H 70° L 40°

More weather at www.uco360.com

DID YOU KNOW? In France it is legal to marry a dead person.

A new campaign offering free contraceptives for women is being launched by Planned Parenthood Federation of America and the American Congress of Obstetricians and Gynecologists. The campaign, called Birth Control Matters, aims to make sure all prescription methods of contraception are covered without co-pays as part of the preventive services package that will be determined sometime in the next year by the Institute of Medicine and the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS). The decision on whether to include it in the healthcare reform guidelines has been put off for months. While many benefits of the healthcare reform law will not take effect until 2014, some smaller changes to health insurance will provide big benefits in the next year. In particular, new health insurance policies will be prohibited from requiring co-pays or deductibles for “preventive services” like cancer screenings, as well as immunizations and smokingcessation programs. The idea is to cut health care costs because prevention is much cheaper than treating illnesses. In July, HHS published a list of the services that will be covered under this provision for public comment. Not included: contraception. Instead,

HHS asked the Institute of Medicine to make recommendations on what should be included beyond the current list. The deadline for those rules is next Aug. 1. According to new polling done for Planned Parenthood by Hart R e -

search Associa t e s , more than 70 percent of those polled earlier this summer said prescribed birth control should be covered under preventive health care, including 77 percent of Catholic women, 72 percent of GOP women votes and 60 percent of male voters.

In an npr.org article, Hart Research President Geoff Garin said, “This is different from other aspects of the abortion debate. Contraception is the middle ground in the abortion wars where those on both sides meet happily.” However, not everyone agrees. The U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops argue in a letter sent to the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services in mid-September that contraception should not be offered as a preventive service without co-pays or deductibles. Out-of-pocket costs for birth control can be prohibitively expensive for many women, especially those with low-incomes. The high price of birth control can result in women using birth control inconsistently or not at all, often leading to unintended pregnancies. Co-pays for birth-control pills can be $40 to $50 a month, and the cost of more effective methods like IUDs and contraceptive implants are much higher. “I use Mirena and it’s good for five years,” junior Kerri Hunt, fashion marketing major said. “But it cost about $800 and my insurance only covered around $400. I’m still making payments.” “As a student, that is one of the hardest things,” Hunt said. “Actually paying for [birth control] when you have so many other bills…not everyone can do that.”

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