Meet The Woman Behind The Komen Race For The Cure
Published: June 18, 2005
More than 60,000 people will be in downtown St. Louis June 18 for the Komen St. Louis Race for the Cure. It is a national event, held in cities all across America at different times.
In St. Louis on the day before the race, volunteers worked to set up boxes, tables and tents near the race route. While the preparation continued with hundreds of volunteers, few actually knew much about the woman who started the Susan G. Komen Breast Cancer Foundation and the Race for the Cure.
She told Newschannel Five’s Karen Foss about why she began her mission and about her sister, the woman who inspired this emotional event.
“My sister was my best friend, and she was just an amazing person,” said Nancy Brinker, Susan Komen’s sister.
Childhood holds wonderful memories for Brinker.
“We had a wonderful time growing up in Peoria, (Illinois),” she recalled.
“We always did a lot of things together, including fundraising from the time I was five and she was eight.”
When big sister Susan was diagnosed with breast cancer at 33, it was Brinker’s turn to be the strong one. The year was 1977.
“And at the time, there were no 1-800 numbers. There were no patient support groups for young women. There was no internet. Comprehensive cancer centers were out of reach for most people,” she said.
“The words ‘breast cancer’ were scarier to some people than the disease, because people were terrified of the treatment, terrified of having to have a mastectomy, and she was young and beautiful, and she was frightened from the beginning,” Brinker said.
During the next three years, Susan would undergo nine operations, radiation, and three rounds of chemotherapy. But the treatment was no match for the disease.
Brinker’s time with her big sister was coming to an end.
“She asked if I would do something to make sure other people didn’t suffer the way our family had, and she had, and I committed I would,” Brinker remembers.
Susan Komen died in 1980. She was 36. Two years later, the Susan G. Komen Breast Cancer Foundation was born.
“Our first event being in 1982, and Race for the Cure in 1983 was the first Race for the Cure in Dallas, Texas,” Brinker said.
“I always had a big vision. I didn’t know what path it was going to take, but I knew it had to be big.”
Today there are Komen affiliates or a Race for the Cure in 114 United States cities, as well as Italy, Puerto Rico and Germany.
The foundation has raised hundreds of millions of dollars and given away over half a billion to research and breast health programs, but there’s more work to be done.
Amazon discount!“We must make more headway with women with metastatic disease. We must move to the next plateau, which is making breast cancer a manageable disease, not a killing disease, making sure that woman with it have a higher quality of life,” Brinker said.
That’s a mission Nancy Brinker is dedicated to carrying out. Her big sister would have wanted it.
“She was an amazing person and she deserved to have her name known for what she believed in, because she was so special,”
Brinker emphasized. “At the same time she recognized that her story was really every woman’s story. It isn’t just our story. It happens to all the families who suffer with breast cancer.”
If you enjoyed this good news Subscribe to Good News Blog
Share this
To share this simply copy and paste one of the below URL's: