Walking into the future
in honour of loved ones

When Yee Fun Wong describes her experience at the 2014 Pharmaprix Weekend to End Women’s Cancers as having been “really raw”, she’s referring to much more than the physical exertion of covering the lengthy route through the streets of Montreal. Rather, she’s talking about the emotions she felt in the absence of her close friend, Katrina Teske, who was supposed to have walked alongside her.

Ms. Teske, a research assistant in the Lady Davis Institute at the JGH, died of ovarian cancer shortly before last summer’s event, despite her hope that she might be well enough to participate. “I cried at the starting line,” Ms. Wong recalls, “because I had wanted so much to walk with her, and there we were without her. What could we do but take the baton and carry on?”

The resolve to keep walking was strengthened this year, as friends and relatives decided to do whatever they could to fight the disease that had taken Ms. Teske from them. In her honour, Ms. Wong says, they named their team Katrina’s Awesome Possums, a tribute to Ms. Teske’s fondly remembered habit of giving rhyming nicknames to those who were close to her.

Ms. Wong says that Ms. Teske began experiencing abdominal pains in 2013 while visiting her family near Kingston. What she first thought was a gastrointestinal bug was eventually diagnosed as cancer, for which she underwent treatment that seemed to produce good results. But after the treatment ended, doctors discovered an additional form of cancer that had previously escaped detection.

As someone who’s active throughout the year and has already experienced the Weekend, Ms. Wong isn’t planning to do anything special to train for the event this August. The big challenge, she says, is in varying her pace to keep in step with teammates who may sometimes need to walk more slowly than she does. “It’s all about keeping together,” she adds, “because that’s what Katrina would have wanted.”