WHY? OH WHY DO I DO WHAT I DO?

If you’re like me, then you’ve known someone…many “someone’s” …who’ve done battle with the malady known as cancer. I have no conscience recollection of not knowing about the existence of cancer.
My great aunt had breast cancer in the early sixties. I was born in 1961. I remember the whispered conversations about how much weight she had lost, how gaunt she looked at family gatherings. I remember the conjecture that she surely wouldn’t live till the next holiday. Aunt Teddy came from rugged stock proving them wrong…for a long time. I remember the scarves when she went through cobalt treatments. I remember visiting her bedside toward the end of her life. I remember her leaving us, little by little. Each time I saw her, she seemed to have slipped away from us just a bit more.
That was my first introduction to that deadly killer. It was not our last meeting. In 1989, my mother succumbed to cervical cancer after a courageous 5 year battle. I watched her cancer do its deadly work, one day at a time. I saw her go through testing and hospitalization and treatments and surgery that scared her so. There were strangers she came to depend upon when hospice came into her home. I saw my grandmother’s pain as she lost her only child. I watched my father lose the wife he had loved for a quarter of a century. My brother and I experienced that void in losing our mother.
There have been so many others…Sharon, Peggy, Kathy, Rheinhold, and Carol, to name a few who were gone too soon. And there are the survivors who battle this vicious unconscionable killer with constant vigilance…Ann, Jim, Danielle, Kent, Amanda and Sue. That’s over a dozen folks! Thirteen people I can think of quickly who I’ve known have been affected by this modern plague.
It adds up to more people than that when I do the math. For every person who has been afflicted, there is the fear that grips their loved ones. There is the ripple effect that spreads out as more and more individuals feel the impact of these random acts of cancer.
I see some friend or other and their families dealing with this killer on a daily basis. I get angry. The rage builds. I don’t want to let this awful disease have its day of rule over my loved ones. But, what can one person do? Well, last year was the first year that I Relayed. This year I chose to be a team captain. Kent and Sue have kids who want to Relay…kids of survivors, who deserve a chance to fight this disease in their own way. It is this fight that makes me feel less powerless. Relay gives me a say and what I say is this, “I will fight this disease with any weapon at my disposal, with every fiber of my being and I will dedicate myself to doing what I can to eradicate it by any means necessary."

"TODAY, I SAY RELAY!”