A Run for Life : Breast Cancer Survivors, Loved Ones of Disease’s Victims Unite in ‘Race for the Cure’

Jeanne Rogers is the last of the Bosom Buddies.

She joined the 10-member support group after being diagnosed with breast cancer six years ago. Then she watched the disease pick off her friends one by one, the last two years ago.

“I’m the only survivor,” said Rogers, 43, a one-time Fullerton police officer who lives in Orange.

On Sunday, a pink paper signed with the names of her late friends--”my little angels,” Rogers calls them--hung from her T-shirt before she was pushed in a wheelchair around Fashion Island surrounded by Lycra-wrapped runners and walkers in the third annual “Race for the Cure,” a benefit for the nationwide Susan G. Komen Breast Cancer Foundation.

“I’m here to educate other women,” said Rogers, who now relies on her 15-year-old daughter and a church group for support. “I’m the only one left and I feel it must be for a purpose.”

Rogers was one of about 500 breast cancer survivors at the event, which grew this year to attract more than 10,500 participants and spectators and was expected to raise as much as $400,000 for cancer-detection programs and research.

The survivors, easy to spot in pink visors marked with the number of years each has lived with the disease, were guests of honor as well as symbols of the high-stakes hunt for a breast cancer cure.

“We’re looking at, in this decade, 1 1/2 million Americans developing breast cancer,” said Dava F. Gerard, a Santa Ana surgeon and founding president of the foundation’s Orange County chapter. “And we’re looking at losing half of them.”

The fast-growing yearly race, one of 46 that the foundation is holding nationwide this year, has become the group’s biggest funding source for Orange County operations, which include testing programs for women who can’t afford to pay for tests. Three-fourths of the proceeds are to be used for local programs and one-fourth for national research, foundation officials said.

The event drew top-rated runners, weekend joggers and many others who made their way around the race course on foot, bicycle, stroller and little red wagon. Gayle Wilson, the wife of Gov. Pete Wilson, wore bib No. 10000 and walked a one-mile loop with officials from the Dallas-based foundation.

“It does so much for people who are dealing with breast cancer or have family members or friends,” said Elizabeth Hart, who chairs the foundation’s board of directors. “Almost everyone is touched by it and it’s a way they can get involved.”

Signs pinned to runners’ shirts memorialized those who died and saluted the many more who have outlived the disease, which afflicts about 1,700 Orange County women a year and kills more than 400. Breast cancer, the leading cause of cancer death among women ages 35 to 54, has afflicted more than 1.7 million women nationwide, according to the National Alliance of Breast Cancer Organizations.

A group of Anaheim elementary-school teachers wore “Debby’s Dream Team” signs in memory of colleague Debby Myres, who they said died of cancer last June after thinking she had beaten the disease two years earlier.

“It’s totally emotional seeing those people because it reminds you of Debby,” said one of the teachers, Julie Klinkenberg. She said Myres was too ill to join a school contingent last year but remained close to colleagues--giving them as her farewell present a poster that lists 903 reasons to be happy. It hangs in the teacher’s lounge, Klinkenberg said.

Another teacher, Stephanie Tanaka, said the race “gives us a good feeling, too, to feel we’re supporting them.”

Rogers wasn’t the only participant who remembers her friends as angels. A group of two dozens friends and relatives accompanied Audrey Bierman on a 5-kilometer walk. They wore white cardboard wings labeled “Audrey’s Angels.” Bierman, 58, had a breast removed and underwent chemotherapy after learning during a routine physical examination in 1993 that she had cancer. There had been no warning signs, such as lumps.

“It was real shock,” Bierman said. “I didn’t have time to worry about it. I just got slugged by it.” She credited her informal support group with easing the effects of the treatment and helping with her recovery.

“I want to help other people and tell them it’s not the horror we were always told it was,” she said. “It’s not a death notice.”

Six years after having a cancerous mass removed from her right breast, Rogers is careful not to declare an end to her bout. She still undergoes chemotherapy and recently suffered a mild stroke that she attributes to clotting caused by medication.

And Rogers said her lungs have not been right--a strange cough set in two months ago and the shortness of breath prevented her from walking the course on Sunday. Doctors are scheduled to test lung tissue this week for signs of new cancer.

Rogers considered the worst, then smiled tightly.

“I just think it’s one more thing to get me to grow stronger,” she said.