Visits fuel Relay for Life walkers

After 11 hours on his feet, just shy of the halfway mark in the Canadian Cancer Society Relay for Life, Cristian Silva was feeling the pain.

His feet and knees ached, his body was tired and his mental stamina was being tested as it was really sinking in how tough it was to walk all those laps around the empty CN Centre parking lot.

And then he met Lindy Steele, a retired Prince George teacher who just finished radiation treatments on Wednesday after developing breast cancer. Steele has been a regular participant in the annual cancer walk fundraiser and she and her husband annually took the 4-5 a.m. shift in the team relay until 2019, when he died of cancer.

Steele showed up the first time at about 3:50 a.m. and walked that hour with Silva and Cariboo Prince George MP Todd Doherty, returning two more times to keep them company before their 24-hour relay ended at 5 p.m. Saturday. As she talked to Silva about what cancer has done to her with the loss of her husband and how it has returned to affect her own life, he was not expecting how deeply her story would impact his own emotions.

“She just finished her treatments Wednesday and was here last night, she was here this morning and she was here before the end of this, and if that’s not powerful….” said Silva.

“They come here to empower you and it should be the other way around. It was quite emotional, the amount of people we met through the day and night, listening to their testimonials about losing family members or fighting cancer themselves. It gives you a different perspective.”

Doherty completed the 24-relay on his own last year and one of the highlights of that walk for him was meeting Steele, who came out of the twilight fog and took him by surprise at 4 a.m. when he thought he was alone in the vast parking lot. Her story and the inspiration it provided later brought Doherty to tears and her return this year with the news of her ongoing battle against the disease was a reminder of what motivates him to participate in the walk every year.

“Lindy is a prime example of why we relay,” said Doherty. “She just finished her treatment on Wednesday and she didn’t really have the strength to do much. It’s kind of worn her out but she’s determined to keep fighting and create the memories her husband Larry would have wanted her to do.

“Her attitude is so infectious.”

One out of every two Canadians has either had cancer or has had somebody close to them - a family member, close friend, neighbor or co-worker - touched by the disease. Before he started the walk, Silva thought he was in that luckier half of society until he realized he had worked with people who have had to deal with it.

“The hardest thing was not having a good understanding of what cancer does to you, to the families, to the neighbours to our community,” said Silva, a 53-year-old youth care worker for School District 57.

“I know what cancer is and what it does to your body – it’s an illness. But when you start looking at a human being behind that… it’s quite different when you’re walking and you have people come up to you with a smile. You wonder who are these people, and then they start describing what they have gone through, losing a husband or a son, a nephew and themselves having to go through therapy - quite hard.

“The pain we’re feeling physically and in our knees and our toes – something is going on there and you don’t want to look because it’s going to be a blister or two – but this pain is nothing compared to what they go through. It’s just amazing to see them come to you with a smile. That’s something I’ll never be able to take out of my head. They still have the hope.”

Silva says the Relay for Life not only raises money for cancer research but also creates awareness of the need to find a cure, something he hopes to see in his lifetime. The two of them raised close to $5,400 for the cause. Both anticipate the relay will be back next year as a massive event involving hundreds of people from all over the region, as it was for years before the pandemic hit last year.

Doherty traveled most of the day Friday from Ottawa and arrived at about 2:30 p.m. just before the walk, so he was awake for two solid days by the time his second-straight 24-hour marathon was over. He hauled his trailer to the parking lot and they used that for bathroom breaks and to take five- or 10-minute rests every three or four hours. Doherty lost his father-in-law to cancer in February and has had several friends affected by the disease.