The 9th annual Pink Lady Walk event at Big Spring Park on Saturday, Oct. 8, 2022, is the first year that a 5K run accompanies the usual festivities, and the event that started with just a donation box on the day of has become an accredited organization that educates the community and supports Limestone County women battling breast cancer.

“This is my passion,” said founder and two time breast cancer survivor Sharon Carter.

They have raised funds for 14 breast cancer survivors, one child with cancer, Hospice of Limestone County, and the Patient Assistance Fund at the Southern Cancer Center since the event began in 2014.

Carter said after her second diagnosis in 2012 she had been attending a support group for breast cancer survivors, which was good for a little while, but she knew it was time to think bigger.

“I was like ‘I’ve got to do something else’ … It was like how many times can I tell my same story to the same people,” Carter said.

She went to a walk that a friend of hers put together in Rogersville at the beginning of October 2014 and asked her how to put one together. “She told me how she did it, and I did it that same month. It was small, but I wanted to get it started.”

That year she just had a box wrapped with a slit in the top and people who came to the park donated, and the Pink Lady Walk just gave the person who had been selected the box with the funds.

“We didn’t know what was in it, how much was in it. I did that the first two years, 2014 and ‘15. 2016 I started doing t-shirts. Started setting up registration where people could go online and register. Created the 501c3 in 2016, and the IRS determined that we were a public charity,” Carter said. “Believe it or not, I did it all by myself. I didn’t hire a lawyer, I basically just bugged the IRS.”

Carter grew up in Athens and got her associate’s degree at Calhoun Community College and her bachelor’s at Athens State. She also has a master’s degree and has worked in higher education for 20 years, and at Calhoun for 10.

“When I started doing the Pink Lady Walk, I didn’t know how it was going to take off or how it was going to be received, especially in your own hometown among your own people,” she said.

But, despite any hesitation, she knows getting information out to the community about things like early detection with mammograms is important.

“My thing is just getting the people to be aware of breast cancer, especially in the black community. Although we are not the ones with the most diagnoses, we are the ones with the highest mortality rate,” she said.

“The first time I was diagnosed was in 2006,” Carter said. “I had my mammogram, and then they actually sent me to have a biopsy … I had a different type of breast cancer in each breast so I had a double masectomy.”

Carter said after she was first diagnosed she went back to work that day, and when her coworkers asked about her diagnosis she told them and said, “I didn’t know what else to do. So I just went back to work, and I just dealt with it like that.”

She also described how after her mastectomy there was morphine available for the pain, but she never used it.

“I don’t view it as the hardest thing that I’ve ever been through, because I just looked at it differently. I didn’t go into it with a defeated mindset.”

“I remember one day I was standing up in the mirror right after I had my mastectomy, and I had all these tubes and I just started crying. I said ‘I look like an alien.’ It’s okay to cry, but you cannot let that consume you because all sickness is not unto death.”

She said she relied on scriptures to get her through her diagnosis, remembering how God said not only would there be life but that life would be abundant.

“You never know how strong you are until you have to be,” Carter said. “You don’t think about breathing; you just breathe, right? So just don’t think about stuff; you just do it. It’s just something that has to be done, so you just do it. That’s how I looked at my journey.”