After several months of planning and organizing, Friday night's Relay for Life went fairly smoothly! My team managed to pull everything together to get the setup done, the food and drinks supplied, the walking delegated and the money raised! I invited my mom and my friend JoAnna to come walk in the survivor walk with me, along with the 3 other survivors on our team who were present. There were over 200 survivors walking this year, and the event raised around $175,000!!We had lots of food, with burgers and dogs grilled up by my dear husband, and a nice time socializing with our fellow coworkers on a lovely evening. The luminaria ceremony was a bit long, but there were a couple of very inspirational and interesting speakers. One was a man named Pat whose family had this very rare hereditary form of stomach cancer. I remembered hearing this story on the news a couple of years ago, but I didn't know that one of the family members was from Lawrence. You can read the print article about the family online, but in a nutshell, his grandmother died of this rare stomach cancer, and then all of her remaining children (one of his parents and all of his aunts/uncles) died of the disease as well. The article online says that his grandmother passed the faulty gene to 7 of her children and 6 of them died in their 40s and 50s, but Pat said that all of her children died of the disease, so I think maybe he meant all that were still alive. Regardless, when one of his cousins was diagnosed, they did genetic testing right before his death to allow for testing on other relatives, and so the remaining 18 grandchildren were tested. Eleven were found to be positive for the gene, which gave them a 70% chance of developing the disease. Although Pat was not a carrier of the defect, of the 11 who were (one being his older brother), all had their stomachs completely removed to prevent dying from the cancer themselves. As it turns out, each of those 11 did have early signs of the cancer in their stomachs and would have developed the disease. I thought it was an amazing story!
There was also a really inspirational woman who spoke who is battling breast cancer for the second time. She is a 41-year-old mother of 3 who had a mastectomy a few years ago, only to have a body scan reveal over 100 tumors throughout her body a couple of years later. Despite the difficult treatment she's undergoing and what I would imagine is a grim prognosis, her attitude is absolutely amazing and astounding. She looks at each day as a blessing and goes on living her life like nothing's out of the ordinary! It was really neat to hear her speak.
The rest of the evening was very enjoyable and the weather was relatively good. The skies were clear, which was a huge blessing, although it was extremely cold for a night in early June. The temperature dropped down below 50 and those of us who braved the entire night were definitely bundled in several layers and sleeping bags!Although I made an attempt to get a little sleep during the night, I only managed to lay in the tent for 2 hours, listening to the DJ and to the teenage girls in the camp next to me--who were attempting to sing Hotel California in its entirety! Ugh!! I think I dozed for about 15 minutes of those 2 hours, so eventually I just gave up and started walking. During my official 4-5 a.m. walking shift, I managed to walk 4 full miles, which was nice because that really warmed me up! We had pancakes just before 6 a.m. and started cleaning up our campsite soon after, so I was home around 7 a.m.
Friday night's Relay for Life was great fun, but I am definitely glad the whole weekend is over! I need to start concentrating on my next fundraising activity! :)
Enjoy the pictures!
Enjoy the pictures!
