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Cancer survivors saluted during Upshur Relay for Life Dinner

The Inter-Mountain photo by Amanda Hayes Dr. Kimberly Farry speaks during the Upshur County Relay for Life Survivor Dinner held at Chapel Hill United Methodist Church.

BUCKHANNON — July 6, 2016.

That’s the date Robin Oldaker, of Buckhannon, received her cancer diagnosis. She shared her story at Saturday’s Upshur County Relay for Life Survivor Dinner held at Chapel Hill United Methodist Church.

“I was at a ladies Bible study and my phone was on silent but I looked at it and it said Betty Puskar,” she said. “I had a biopsy done and I thought, ‘OK, God. Here we go.”

Oldaker answered that call and heard the words, “You have breast cancer.”

Specifically, Oldaker learned she had stage 0 grade 3 which means it was caught early but it was growing.

“That was a Tuesday,” she said. “On Friday, I was in with the doctors with Mary Babb.”

Oldaker went through radiation.

“That wasn’t how I wanted to spend my summer or my last year of teaching,” she said.

Oldaker said her cancer journey changed her and she refers to life as BC and AC for before and after the cancer diagnosis.

“I’m not the same person,” she said. “I don’t look at life the same way.”

She credits early detection, her faith and her family and friends for leading her through her cancer journey.

Dr. Kimberly Farry said, “We have a lot to celebrate. That’s what happened to Mardi Gras over the last couple hundred years. It turned into a celebration and that’s what we are here for tonight is to celebrate surviving. We hear the diagnosis, go through the treatment, come out on the other end and continue on but it changes us and it changes our lives. We celebrate a new you, a new person who now celebrates life with a different perspective than you did before the diagnosis.”

Farry highlighted some reasons to celebrate because of early diagnosis, detection and treatment.

“In the last 25 years, the death rate from cancer is down 27 percent,” she said. “That’s a lot. When you look at our most common cancers…lung cancer is down 48 percent for men and 23 percent for women, 40 percent for female breast cancer….”

Farry said that the five-year survival rates have also gone up for many of the common cancers as treatments have improved.

There is now a 98 percent survival rate for prostate cancer and a 92 percent survival rate for melanoma.

“It wasn’t that many decades ago in this very community that we knew people who were very dear to us who were diagnosed with melanoma and would die. That is not a diagnosis of death anymore.”

However, Farry said there is more work to be done.

“If you look at cervical cancer alone, the fact that you are born in a poor rural state makes it twice as likely you are going to die from that disease,” she said.

Only 4 percent of people eligible for early lung cancer screening are getting that, according to Farry.

Saturday’s dinner was sponsored by WVU Medicine/St. Joseph’s Hospital with partial sponsorship from Fish Hawk Acre’s.

Upshur County Relay for Life is scheduled for Saturday, July 20 from 4-11 p.m. at Jawbone Park.

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