Relay participants walking for a cure
Published: May 18, 2006
Liz Meadows will be fairly easy to distinguish from other walkers at the beginning of the 2006 American Cancer Society Relay for Life.
She’ll be the one with 17 inches of red hair. But by the end, it may be a little more difficult to spot her.
She’ll be bald. Not from chemotherapy or radiation, but by choice.
A front desk clerk at Best Western in Barboursville, she plans to shed her locks for the cause and to honor her father, Jimmie L. Donnel of Bayard, N.M.
Meadows is an ovarian cancer survivor and said she’ll cut off her hair if Team Best Western meets or exceeds its fundraising goal at the event, which begins at 6 p.m. Friday night at Huntington High School’s track and continues for 12 hours.
On Wednesday, she went wig shopping.
Her parents, Jimmie and Wanda, are living through the nightmare of cancer again since his cancer diagnosis earlier this year. In fact, it was Meadows’ dad who suggested cutting her long red hair, even though he loves it.
“It’s just hair, it will grow back,” Meadows said.
Once shorn, a child in the Locks of Love program will receive a wig made from the hair.
Sherry Kincaid, community manager of the local chapter of the American Cancer Society, expects 3,000 walkers and between 400 and 500 cancer survivors to participate in the relay.
This year’s fundraising goal is $140,000, which is 10 percent more than last year’s effort.
“It’s a way to bring awareness to people,” said T.C. Clemons of Huntington, a breast cancer survivor. She’ll head up a team of students, parents and staff from Highlawn Elementary where she teaches.
Clemons looks at the annual relay as a time of bonding with others and seeing just how much support is out there.
“Sometimes you think it’s just you,” Clemons said. But at the relay, she’s found exactly how many people she knows who have been through the same experience of either being a patient, survivor or caregiver.
The Relay for Life will begin at 12:30 p.m. Friday at Perry Morris Square in Milton. In keeping with the event’s theme of the Olympics, a torch relay will make it’s way 27.5 miles to Huntington High, where the flame will be transferred to the on-site torch.
Lighting the torch will be Sean Hammack, a senior at St. Joseph Central High School in Huntington. A cancer patient, Hammack is currently in physical therapy, Kincaid said.
“Everyone knows someone who’s had cancer,” Meadows said. “It’s touches everyone in the community in some way.”
Meadows, along with everyone else who participates by walking, providing food and other refreshments, or contributing money, has a common goal.
“I’ve seen too much,” Meadows said. “I won’t stop until there’s a cure.”
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