Women wept as they walked through the streets of downtown Salt Lake City on Saturday. Wearing special pink shirts to mark their status as breast cancer survivors and surrounded by family members and friends, they cried in amazement that so many people would get together in hope during the annual Race for the Cure.
They cried at the horror of what they had gone through and the unknown that lay ahead.
More than 18,000 participants - a record number - walked in Salt Lake City this year. Some survivors moved at an optimistic clip. A few were pushed in wheelchairs.
At 49, Karen Memmott had come to be with her fellow breast cancer survivors. It was her first time at the event.
"Everybody you talk to knows somebody it has touched," she said. "It's like an epidemic."
Her grandmother had died of breast cancer, but Memmott thought she would never get it even though she smoked for 28 years.
She discovered a lump in her breast in 2007 but waited six months before she went to the doctor.
"If you find a lump even after you have a mammogram you need to have it checked," Memmott said. "I kind of took it into my own hands, which I shouldn't have."
Without a job or insurance, she got help through the Utah Cancer Control Program, which offers free and low-cost cancer screenings. They helped her sign up for Medicaid.
More than a year later, Memmott, who quit smoking, believes her life might have turned out differently if she had to pay for her own medical care. She might not have survived.
"If I had to pay for it all, then I don't know if I could do it," she said. This was the 13th Salt Lake City Race for the Cure, an annual event held across the country to raise money for research, education, screening and treatment for the medically underserved. Last year, more than $600,000 was donated to local programs thanks to the event.
Wearing a straw hat with a pink string on the crown, Pati Yorgason, 58, and her family were one of the final groups in the crowd of walkers. Sitting in a wheelchair, the Kaysville resident explained that she had first been diagnosed in 2000 and treated, but the cancer returned last year.
"You don't get cured the second time around," she said.
But Yorgason, who was surrounded by about 20 family members, was moved by all the people at the race.
"I think it gives people hope when they see other people who survived it," she said.
Walking nearby was a family wearing shirts that read, "Saving second base." A sister and aunt had both died from breast cancer, they explained, and genetic testing showed two other sisters carried the breast cancer gene. One of them, Ricci Norton, 29, just had a double mastectomy.
"I have a son," she said. "And I don't want to wait to get [cancer]." Being at the race made her cry a lot, said Kathlene Millgate, 51, as she wiped away tears. She had found out about her breast cancer in July. Now her grey hair was cropped stylishly short after her treatment. What happens now?
"Just try to get strong," she said. "Love hard."
