Do you see those goofy, happy people in the picture above? Yes those are best friends, but more importantly they are a group of people who think cancer sucks. I went to a high school where a lot of people felt the same way as us. Every year our school put on an event called Relay for Life through the American Cancer Society. We held it out on football field and this night held the biggest crowd of people in the stands (football was not our thing). Something else all of us had in common on that football field? Cancer had affected our lives in some way. For some it was a Mom or Dad, others grandparents or uncles or aunts or siblings. But for some it was not in the family but their neighbor or best friend’s mom. All of us could see the burden that cancer caused but we all saw it at a different level.
My freshman year of high school, relay was the thing I was most excited about. You hear about it all year. It’s a big deal. But I cared less about the cause and more about my friends. I knew about cancer, the word was not a stranger to me. My mom had cancer as a child and we talked about it as a family quite often because my parents wanted my brother and I to be informed. I had also known people in my life who had been diagnosed but none I was overly close too. So for me it was easy to assume the $100 I had raised was not a big deal. To me it was just a $100 sleepover with all my friends. But then things changed. Suddenly cancer became more real.
My sophomore year of high school was a little different in my relay experience. That year I decided to be a team captain instead of just a team member. If I was more involved I was making a bigger difference, right? But just as registration money was due, news came in that my grandma had stage 4 ovarian cancer. Game changer. My cancer free world was suddenly gone. The next six months preparing for relay were the craziest months. Everything I did in preparation was with my grandma on my mind. All I wanted was for her to be ok and for the American Cancer Society to find a cure and save my grandma. My $100 was not for a big, fun sleepover anymore but instead for the potential to save my grandma.
My grandma made it to the December of my senior year. She fought as hard as she could and sadly lost. Between her diagnosis and her passing I watched my grandma never give up who she truly was. She took long walks outside for as long as she could. She hiked along the north shore with my brother. She went to tea with me. In the hospital she used her experience as a nurse to get exactly what she wanted. And as she laid in her hospital bed near the end she had my dad clean her bedroom windows because they weren’t to her standards.
Just like my sophomore relay was changed by life events so was my senior year one. Watching cancer win is a really awful thing. It’s worse than any loss you have been apart of. After watching someone you love fight so hard all you want to do is watch them succeed. For me senior year relay was me saying to cancer, “you’ve won too many times, at some point you have to lose forever.”
While the cures for every form of cancer can’t just all happen at once I hope that one day I will see a world where they are. But for now I will stay involved in the ways I can and encourage others too as well. We can’t all work in a lab to try and find a cure but we can participate in a Relay for Life event or by donating to the American Caner Society. There are many walks like the Susan G. Komen one, that are another great way to help fight back against such an awful disease.
Cancer knows no limits of who it will affect. So as school starts up again this year, find out if your campus already has an event or start your own. It only takes a few to start a movement. Grab your friends and let's fight this together!
