MAKING STRIDES

WASILLA — When more than 570 Relay For Life participants from 50 teams take to the Wasilla High track Friday evening and all day Saturday, they’ll be fighting against 208 cancers that affect one of every three of us.

For local Relay For Life sponsor Care Tuk and Advocacy/Survivor Chair Angela Hansen, it means the world.

Tuk, a Wasilla author, physical therapist and motivational speaker, knows firsthand the horrors of a cancer diagnosis, the pain of treatments and the importance of a strong will to survive. She has endured 11 different bouts of cancer, including cervical, uterine, ovarian, thyroid, lymph, stomach, breast, colon, brain and malignant melanoma twice.

“She’s still kicking,” Hansen said of Tuk. “It’s crazy, isn’t it? What an incredible woman. Anyone who can go through what she’s been through and have the same positive attitude, how can any of us wake up every day and not think life is great?”

Hansen lost her father to lung cancer in 2004 when he was in his mid-60s and every relative on her mom’s side of the family has died of some sort of cancer.

She said her father was a big-time smoker, so she has since advocated against secondhand smoke and made her four children swear they would never smoke.

“My 14-year-old son started coughing after growing up with a father who smoked in the garage,” she said. “So even if you don’t think it’s affecting anyone, it gets in the air and is transferred through your clothes. It’s just not worth the risk.”

She’s been involved with Relay For Life four years now and can’t get through the 24-hour event without breaking down with emotion at least once.

The most touching part of it, she said, is when survivors make their laps while the bagpipes are blowing.

“It’s incredibly moving,” she said. “But it’s also a fun family event that really brings the community together. It’s a huge celebration to not only raise money for cancer research, but to see how far we’ve come.”

Teams have raised $67,000 as of Monday, but Hansen is confident they will raise the $100,000 to match last year’s total by the August deadline.

Hansen said the efforts of advocates like herself helped get a state bill passed last year that mandates insurance companies cover clinical trials if they are patients’ only chance for survival.

“That’s huge,” she said. “I think most Alaskans understand that most of us will be touched by cancer one way or another and it is in everyone’s best interest to help fight it.”

The event kicks off Friday night at 7 on the WHS track and continues throughout the night until Saturday evening. It’s always held outdoors, Hansen explained, because it symbolizes the stages of cancer.

The kick-off signifies diagnosis and the walk through the evening symbolizes the difficulty of treatment. As the sun begins to rise, it signifies reaching the end of treatment and beginning recovery.

“It has to be outside because, just like we never know how cancer will affect us, we can’t choose the weather,” she said.

“We have to trudge through everything until we get to the other side.”

For more information, see the 2011 Relay For Life of Mat-Su website at main.acsevents.org or email event chairs Shani Vannoy or Kathleen Hanson at xangobykathleen@hotmail.com.

Contact K.T. McKee at kate.mckee@frontiersman.com or 352-2252.