With COVID, breast cancer fundraiser takes to the road

LACONIA — Breast Cancer Awareness Month is being observed this month just as it has every October since 1985, but the 2020 events that raise awareness and money to fight the disease are being tweaked – like most everything else touched by the COVID-19 pandemic.

That adjustment will be on display in Laconia on Sunday, when the American Cancer Society holds its annual Making Strides Against Breast Cancer event.

Normally a walk throughout the city, participants this year are being invited to decorate their cars in pink and join a rolling pink rally in an effort to continue the fight against breast cancer.

“Cancer doesn’t care about COVID,” said Saragene Davis, one of the organizers of the parade-like fundraiser that will take place in Laconia on Sunday.

Seventeen teams have already signed up to raise money for the socially-distanced event. Cars festooned with pink decorations will assemble at 10 a.m. in the parking lot next to the Laconia Middle School. At 10:30 the parade will proceed on a five-mile route around Lake Opechee, up North Main Street, down Elm Street to Lakeport Square, where it will turn down Union Avenue and proceed to Messer Street for the last leg back to the Middle School, according to Barbara Foote, another organizer.

Foote, who serves on the organizing committee, said the parade idea came about after this year’s Laconia High School graduation, when graduates and their families staged a rolling parade immediately after the formal commencement ceremony.

In addition to the parade, participants will be given pink pinwheels which will then be planted in a grassy area near the Middle School to form what Foote called a pinwheel garden.

Foote and Davis hope that, besides those in the parade itself, other people will participate by gathering along the parade route to cheer on participants.

“We’re hoping it will be like a Fourth of July parade,” Foote said. “We hope people will get out there.”

Foote also urged those who cannot participate directly to still help out by donating to help raise money for research into breast cancer’s cause, prevention, diagnosis, treatment and cure.

About 12 percent of women are expected to develop invasive breast cancer at some point in their lives. About 42,170 are expected to die from the disease this year alone, according to the internet health site breastcancer.org.

Breast cancer is personal for both women — Foote as a nurse in a local surgery practice where many patients were being seen for breast cancer, and for Davis, as a survivor.

Davis, of Belmont, got involved in efforts to raise funds for breast cancer research and treatment a year after she had a double mastectomy. 

That was 24 years ago, and to this day she looks at what she has been through with resilience and a sense of humor.

“I got two new boobs and a tummy tuck too,” she said of the procedure where doctors used muscle from her belly and restuffed her breast skin.

A year after the procedure Davis, who was then living in Ohio, got involved with the American Cancer Society and the Komen Foundation and started lobbying the Ohio Legislature on behalf of breast cancer-related measures.

Foote became directly involved in the breast-cancer fundraising efforts three years ago when someone came into the medical office where she was working to put up a poster promoting a Making Strides Against Breast Cancer walk.

“I had seen case after case,” she said, “and I knew that I needed to help.”

For Davis, putting the spotlight every year on breast cancer is both about raising money and raising awareness.

“In the 1990s women hushed it up,” she said. “But breast cancer isn’t going away because you don’t talk about it.”

She also sees this as an opportunity to tell people how important a positive attitude can be when dealing with cancer.

“I may be 70-plus,” she said referring to her chronological age. “But in my body I’m 24 because I have a new attitude on life.”

Davis sees events like Sunday’s fundraising caravan as an opportunity to drive home the message that cancer “needs to be brought to where it is seen as a healing process rather than a dying process.”