Today was the CIBC Run For The Cure and I went with my sister and a co-worker. Thanks for coming with me guys 🙂 I’ve added a couple of pictures.
There was a lot of people there, but not more than I expected. Parts of it were boring, the expected corporate speeches especially but most of it was interesting. I learned that I’m glad I live in BC and had breast cancer. BC has the highest survival rate of Canada. I walked the full 1K. I expected I would. It was another marker for me that I needed to make. One step closer to my normal, new or otherwise. Yes, my knees really hurt but that’s why I’ve been going on the treatmill a few days a week, and why I will keep going.
The breast cancer survivors, me included, wore pink t-shirts (made from that material that wicks the moisture away from your body. Someone was thinking, thank you!), volunteers wore grey and everyone else had white. I know this day is about survivors but I still felt really self-conscious about standing out in a crowd, getting stuff handed to me because I’m ‘one of them’.
Waiting for the Survivor’s Walk, I was talking to some of the other survivors. Mostly newbies like me who haven’t been out of treatment for a year yet. We shared complaints, and timelines and made comparisons of our treatments and the effects. Most of them had the ‘cancer baby’ as my aunt calls the pot belly we all seem to have aquired. They loved my hair and it made a couple of them look forward to the day their hair would be longer.
Even though everyone there was happy and smiling, there was still an undercurrent of sadness that I felt the most when I did the Survivor’s Walk. All the survivors do a curcuit through the crowd while everyone else watches. I know it is meant as proof that we can get through it and we are seen as fighters who overcame sometihng horrible but I still don’t feel brave or courageous. It wasn’t a large group, maybe 1 in 10 or 20 people there was a survivor. And that was sad. There should be more. And we shouldn’t have to be there in the first place. And that made me cry.
I will go again next year. And the year after that.