We need to walk to further the fight

My name is Laura and I work in the Sales Department @ WSOC-TV. I am participating in the Avon Walk for Breast Cancer for many reasons: to find a cure, to bring awareness to the necessity of early detection, to support the individuals who are currently fighting their battle with breast cancer, and to honor and remember those who have lost their battle.

My mother-in-law was 56 when she was first diagnosed with breast cancer. Dee had her left breast removed, had all the preventative radiation, took chemo by pill for 5 years following her mastectomy, was released by her oncologist at year 6 and lived a happy and productive cancer-free life until the disease recurred in her left armpit nearly 20 years after her initial diagnosis. Dee lost her battle with breast cancer at the age of 77 on October 10, 2005. I miss her and consider myself lucky to have had her as my mother-in-law even though it was only for 3 short years.

By participating in the Avon Walk for Breast Cancer, I hope to bring attention and awareness to 2 issues: the length of time you continue to see your oncologist after being diagnosed with breast cancer and the treatment of the cancer itself.

I truly feel that if my mother-in-law had continued to see her oncologist once a year, he would have been able to detect the recurrence much earlier. And as for the cancer treatment, we all know how the radiation and chemotherapy ravages the human body, causing you to lose hair, causing organ shutdown, and various other discomforts and problems.

We have to develop a way to treat this disease so that we can stop killing people with the treatment itself. In Dee’s case, she was hospitalized in intensive care receiving massive doses of chemo which caused her kidneys to fail. She was not a candidate for dialysis, so all we could do was make her comfortable and wait for her organs to begin shutting down one by one and eventually pass, which took 4 days.

We need to walk to further the fight………we need to walk for people like Dee, who did everything she was supposed to do but still lost the fight. We need to walk for better preventative breast health screening, we need to walk for a change in the thinking of oncologists so that cancer patients will be seen a minimum of once a year for the rest of their lives.

We need to walk and raise money to further research for cancer-killing treatments that will not kill off a healthy body. Please join me in the walk to fight breast cancer! Join the walk, donate, support with prayer………we need everyone to join the fight against breast cancer.

The more of us who walk, the more of us survive.

WSOC