Cancer - Be Gone!
Saturday, March 13, 2010
By: Nona Barratt

I really hate cancer. It has destroyed so many of my family and friends starting 61 years ago when I knew nothing about cancer. It is past time for cancer to disappear. Come Relayers - let's do what we can to make cancer be gone.

I was about 6 years old when my mother was really sick - the reasons were whispered behind closed doors, and children were not supposed to know it was cancer. 17 years later, I heard the word "cancer", in relation to one of my best friend's young child - healthy at 12 months, diagnosed with a rare type of cancer at 15 months, and after being used as a guinea pig and encountering many horrid side effects, passed away at the age of 19 months.
Cancer was still not "real" to me until the late 1970's when my mother had another cancer diagnosis from which she did not survive. That's when I started to learn the ugly truth about the disease. I thought I new lots, but I really knew nothing. Then I had the opportunity to work for the Canadian Cancer Society, and that was when my real education began. I listened with empathy and dismay to people's stories. I lost a cousin to lung cancer and learned some more. I lost so many friends and relatives to cancer that my in-memory luminaries numbered in the 20s. Last year, my sister was taken after a 3 year battle. Now one of my very good friends, with a young teenager, fights her horrible battle and I pray every day that she will survive and thrive. I say, that while I have not been a victim of cancer, I am a survivor of life filed with cancer.
That is why the Relay For Life is so important - lets go Relay - lets make enough dollars for research that others may survive and that soon, cancer will BE Gone!