General News
19 October, 2024
You can't cancel cancer: Relay for Life prospers despite last-minute change
Horsham Relay for Life 2024 continued with evert despite weather
When wind and rain threatened to cancel Horsham's annual Cancer Council Relay for Life, rather than cancel the event organisers decided to pivot and go ahead with it but with a few adjustments.
"You can't cancel cancer," Chair and organiser Millie Kemp said.
"When people are diagnosed with cancer, they can't just say, well I'll just cancel that, so we didn't believe cancelling the event was an option either," she said.
Organisers arranged an indoor event rather than the oval as originally planned and set up a track circling tables and chairs for each team in the Coughlin Park Club Rooms.
"We had arranged food from local businesses and all the teams were ready to take part so we kept it at the same address, we just moved it inside," Ms Kemp said.
Melissa and Ebony Ritchie were walking for their husband and father who succumbed to cancer in 2016.
"Our first date was at Relay for Life when we met in 2014.
"We worked together and he was playing music at the Relay for Life, he asked me go with him and we were together from that day onwards. We did Relay for Life every year since then bringing the children Edan and Ebony with us," she said.
"My sister has had cancer too and we have friends affected by it so we walk for them all."
Rachel Leonard, Cancer Council Community Coordinator introduced a short video explaining simply how some of the latest in research has discovered a way to take the accelerator off the cancer cell and secondly put the brake on it so it cannot start up.
Bill Deleeuw is a cancer survivor and walks every year. His wife Trish has been on the Relay for Life committee since 2007and continues to support the work which helped her husband survive bowel cancer. He is now 87.
Ms Kemp is keen to encourage painting the town purple and hopes more people will join in the tradition next year.