Time to Walk!

The Avon Walk officially begins Saturday the 12th at 6:30am with the kickoff in Golden Gate Park, then we walk for 26 miles, camp out on Chrissy Field on San Francisco Bay, get up and walk another 13 miles on Sunday before the closing ceremony ends at 3:30. That's just the official stuff!

There is also the gathering of friends from far and wide...one flying in today after spending the night in the Chicago airport, another flying in tomorrow from North Carolina, and yet another driving up from San Diego and hoping to not get stuck somewhere in the middle because of fires. I will never forget that I have some amazing friends!

Then there is the packing. Calling each other every night for days trying to figure out what we need, how this will work, what to wear when we know the temperature with change 40-50 degrees each day, how to mark our tents so we don't end up lost in the sea of identical tents on the field Saturday night, and making sure we don't forget that all important chap stick and band aids!

And the hotel. Check-in for the event is Friday afternoon, so we will stay at a hotel close to where we will need to meet the shuttles between 3:30 and 5:30am on Saturday morning (YIKES!). Last night I called the hotel to double-check our reservations and to ask a couple of questions. Somehow, in the course of this perfectly banal conversation, I accidentally made the reservation clerk cry!

When she asked why I was coming up, I told her about the walk. She is from the UK and she mentioned what wonderful work the Avon Foundation has done with breast cancer in the UK. She wasn't aware of this event, so we chatted a bit. In the course of the discussion, she told me that her mum had died of breast cancer. Apparently she'd beaten it once, but it came back and was untreatable by the time they caught it. I told her about my diagnosis last August and told her that I'm doing this so that I, and the millions of women like me and like her mum, don't get it again. We chatted a bit more and I hope that our talk helped her. She is still grieving so much.

After that call, it hit me again how hard this weekend is going to be. The walk brings together families who are grieving. Like me they may be grieving the loss of their pre-cancer lives, or they are grieving the loss of a friend, a partner, a mother or a daughter who has had to battle this insidious disease. I'm still not quite ready to call myself a survivor, but someday soon I will be ready. If raising this money and walking with all of these amazing people takes me, and everyone like me, one step closer to staying a survivor, it will be totally worth it.