The First of Many Photos from the 3 Day Walk

One of my favorite photos

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That's me dead center, looking at the camera and waving. I'm in the sunlight and you can see only part of my face.

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At the end of the three days of walking everyone walked into Phoenix Stadium for a closing ceremony. I learned on the first day of the walk that the survivors on the walk were to walk in together last behind the other walkers and the crew members. It disturbed me at the time that I would not be walking in with my teammates - Steph and Kristin. We had made the journey together and I thought should finish together. But as I thought about it more, I realized that yes I had made the journey with them, but I had also made a journey that all the other Breast cancer survivors had made also. As survivors we may have not made our cancer journeys together, we did however make the same journey; from hearing the diagnosis to having to tell our friends and family to dealing with the elephant in the room to making treatment decisions that we will never know if they are correct or not to dealing with medical bills to the pain and struggle of treatment to living with the fear that at anytime it can come back and that this time it doesn't go away to deciding that we weren't only going to fight the cancer in ourselves but we are going to join the fight to make a difference and end cancer once and for all for everyone by participating in the walk. I decided that the walk was like my like cancer journey - my friends were with me during the whole journey but in the end it was still a journey by myself. I needed to walk in with the other survivors and show myself to the world as a representative of a survivor. Cancer may not define me but I am one of the many faces of cancer.

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It is hard for me to put into words the feeling I had when they had us survivors join together before we walked into the stadium. I have to admit that I have been really struggling with my self esteem since I finished treatment. Let's face it I am not even close to the same person as I was physically or mentally since my diagnosis and I've been embarrassed to have had cancer and have tried to forget about the whole thing. I was really nervous before the walk to face it all again. There were 200 or so survivors on the walk out of 1,800 walkers. When I walked up to the group of survivors and saw the smiles and tears, I was as proud as I have ever been to be a part of such a group of wonderful women. Very few of us knew each other but we all held our head's up high and looked each other in the eye as we hugged and cried and laughed and appreciated each other. We may not have know each other's names but we knew each other's journeys.

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I will have quite a few more posts about the 3 Day Walk. We raised over 4 million dollars to fight cancer and end it forever. That is first and foremost the most important part of the walk. For me personally, I learned to say...

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"My name is Linda and I am proud to be a breast cancer survivor. I walk because Everyone Deserves a Lifetime."