If racecar driver Danica Patrick has her way, athletes and everyday Americans will be wearing a whole lot of orange through the month of November. You see, Patrick is trying to raise awareness about Chronic Obstructive Pulmonary Disease or COPD. She and other members of the COPD Coalition are taking a page from those pink-wearing breast cancer awareness groups by christening orange as the color to be worn throughout COPD awareness month, which is November.
“It’s really going to be my mission to make people associate orange and November with COPD the way we associate pink and the ribbon with breast cancer and to make it that recognizable,” she told Yeas & Nays. “If we can get football players to wear pink, by golly, we can get them to wear orange.”
Patrick has a personal stake in the task. The disease, which goes undiagnosed in half of those who have it, killed her grandmother. “She died when she was only 61-years-old and it was really hard to see her go through what she had to go through,” Patrick said.
This was the first time Patrick had done any sort of advocacy on the Hill and she admitted the experience gave her the jitters. “I’m always nervous with public speaking, I’m very comfortable in a Q&A sort of setting, but when it comes to having a speech and laying things out, well, it’s not what I practice,” she said.
And strangely, for a racecar driver, D.C.’s lane-switching rush hour traffic patterns made her a bit jumpy too. “We were driving down the road with a double yellow line and we were on the left hand side and I was kind of having a panic moment thinking [the driver] was just being really brave because I told him to, ‘get after it,'” she laughed, saying overall the trip was a good one.
