Rosie's Letter

If you look at my Avon Walk page, you'll see that I was able to reach my initial fundraising goal in only two weeks. And important part of that success was Rosie, my amazing girlfriend, sending out this fundraising letter to her e-mail address book. You'll need your hankies for this one!

Rosie's Letter :

By the time my late partner Dana died on January 29, 2000, she had been through an unimaginably horrible series of treatments known among cancer patients as "slash, poison, and burn": a mastectomy, followed by several courses of chemotherapy, and finally radiation to control the tumors that eventually attacked her brain. From August 1996 until she died, we witnessed her uncomplaining courage as she fought the disease.

Five years later, I had the good fortune to fall in love with another wonderful woman, Liane Curtis. Seven months after we first started seeing each other, she was diagnosed with Inflammatory Breast Cancer (IBC), a rare and particularly virulent form of the disease which five years ago was still a death sentence. As you can imagine, I was deeply shocked, dismayed, and overwhelmed by her diagnosis. How could it be? In my mind's eye, all the images I had vanquished of Dana's suffering came back to me. I was overcome with the memories of the pain, the hurdles and the obstacles that Dana dealt with and my heart felt paralyzed with fear.

Liane's first treatment was every bit as bad as I remembered Dana's to be. It was as if my heart fainted to see it. Unlike Dana's experience, however, Liane's doctors immediately adjusted the medication and she proceeded through a very radical course of chemotherapy (needed for IBC) to the mastectomy, and finally to a course of six weeks of daily radiation. Aside from a loss of weight and some tiredness, Liane was able to weather the treatment fairly well. Today, she has been declared as having "No Evidence of Disease." In five years time, advances in the treatment of the disease made it possible for the doctors to make those adjustments.

In the weeks since her treatment ended, she attended a friend from her support group, Regina, who was diagnosed at the same time that Liane was but who died of IBC at the beginning of March. She is determined to continue to fight cancer even though she no longer has it (and of course, we pray that she will never again be afflicted by it.) Towards that end, she has signed up to do the Avon Walk for Cancer, a 39-mile marathon to be completed over two days in May. While I cannot personally walk with her because of my arthritis, I am writing to you in the hope that you will sponsor her walk.

Better than anyone, I can tell you that your contribution WILL make a difference. Liane's experience of the treatment, while no picnic, and her prognosis are both much better than they would have been five years ago: I witnessed the difference on a day to day basis. Statisticians say that one out of every eight women will get breast cancer. It is imperative that we treat breast cancer as an epidemic and work together to attack it from every side. Every contribution, no matter how small, is needed to combat this curse.

Rosie's story is an amazing one. And if you are so moved, we hope to get more Avon contributions for my teammate Rose Theresa, you can give on her page here.