Atrium Health Navicent celebrates with Cancer Survivors for National Cancer Survivors Month
MACON, Georgia (41NBC/WMGT) – Outside of the Atrium Health Navicent Peyton Anderson Cancer Center, cancer survivors, their families, and Atrium staff gathered to celebrate National Cancer Survivors Month.
Amazing Grace
was sung in unison as they formed a human cancer awareness ribbon, cheering as a drone flew overhead taking pictures.
Latasha Hill, Breast Imaging Service Line Manager for Atrium Health Navicent, who came up with the idea along with other staff says today was about celebrating the survivors’ resilience, strength, and to remind people in the community to get those checkups.
“Whether it’s breast, whether it’s lung, whether it’s prostate, ovarian. Those early detection checks are the key to surviving cancer,” said Hill. “So that’s why we wanted to come together today with our patients and the community.”
Faith Brewer, a Breast Cancer Survivor, also stresses to get checkups as she skipped her mammogram last year and was diagnosed in February and recently had to have a double mastectomy in April. She says she is very grateful for Atrium’s staff and has so much more to look forward to in life.
“People have been following up with me and keeping in touch with me and making me feel like they really cared about me,” said Brewer.
“Just meeting other people and hearing their stories, it gives me faith that I have a long road ahead of me because they’re doing wonderful. I just have so much more to look forward to. It’s not the sad news as years ago when you were told, oh, you have breast cancer and you don’t have that long to live, it’s like, no, I have a long time to live. I’ll probably live up to my 90s or 100s because of all the stories I’ve been hearing from the survivors and it’s just a great group of people.”
“It’s really, I think, the way you think of it,” said Brewer. “You can let it bring you down and you can be depressed or you can take it and say, I’m going to win this and this is how we’re going to do it.”
According to The National Cancer Institute (NCI) Office of Cancer Survivorship (OCS) as of this month there are over 18 million cancer survivors across the United States.
