First-hand Relay experience

By Staff
Melissa Cason
The Franklin County Relay for Life fundraiser event is only five weeks away. Over the course of years, the fundraiser has grown from a small event to a large production.
The success of the Relay is owed to the volunteers who make each year's fundraiser fun and entertaining for the participants.
Lynn Suddith is one of the volunteers who works behind the scenes by attending meetings to plan each year's event and leads a team for the event as well.
Lynn attended her first Relay in 1995, just one year after her husband, Ricky, was diagnosed with non-Hotchkins Lymphoma.
"He had been training for the Boston Marathon and was losing a lot of weight," Suddith said. "We just figured it was because of all the running he had been doing."
Ricky ran the Boston Marathon in April 1994. One month later he was diagnosed with cancer after it was discovered in routine blood work.
"I remember he went in for some blood work, and I was here at work," Suddith said. "He called me and said that he had cancer…I wanted to die."
Lynn said she was the one who was most terrified by Ricky's diagnosis.
"I remember sitting with him at a restaurant across from Helen Keller and him saying to me that we were lucky because we'd get to look at life differently since his diagnosis," she said.
After the initial diagnosis, the couple went immediately to M.D. Anderson in Houston, Texas where he began treatment.
"He was already in Stage 4, which is as bad as you can get," Suddith said. "They put him in a clinical trial of new drugs and had a local doctor administer the treatment here."
Ricky underwent 13 months of treatment and forced the cancer into remission.
"I remember when the Relay came around that first year after his diagnosis," Lynn said. "I didn't understand that a survivor is anyone who has been diagnosed with cancer and is still living. You don't have to be cancer-free to be a survivor."
Lynn and Ricky have been involved with Relay ever since.
"He goes to the survivor's dinner and always walks the survivor's lap," she said.
Today, Ricky has been cancer-free for 12 years, but Lynn said even today she is concerned that her husband's cancer could come back.
"You notice every little thing and you get it checked out," she said. "So far it hasn't come back, but we don't know for sure that it won't."
Lynn is the team captain for the First Baptist Church, and she serves as the on-line chairperson for the Relay For Life Committee.