EAGLE — By night, newly rosy streetlights illuminate this small Western Slope town about 127 miles west of Denver. By day, pink flowers bloom in containers, echoing the color in 27 banner-sized photographs of Colorado scenes displayed on buildings throughout town.
This is Pink Colorado, the vision of Holli Snyder, general manager of the mountain resort radio company NRC Broadcasting and a recent breast-cancer survivor.
A little over a year ago, Snyder was diagnosed with Stage 1 breast cancer. At age 44, she was nearly 20 years younger than the national median age of others diagnosed with breast cancer.
When she became a patient at Eagle Valley’s Shaw Cancer Center, Snyder was surprised to meet other relatively young — premenopausal — female breast-cancer patients.
“About 38 percent of our patients, from 2008 to 2010, were under age 49 when they were diagnosed,” said Peggy Carey, vice president of oncology at the Shaw Cancer Center.
“I don’t know if we can say there’s a trend yet, but we’re all raising our eyebrows and saying, ‘Hmm.’ “
According to the Komen Advocacy Alliance, women younger than 45 account for about 10 percent of all breast-cancer patients. Breast cancer is the leading cause of cancer deaths in women under age 40. “We’re talking about a vital component of American society,” said Dr. Virginia Borges, an oncologist at the CU Cancer Center and founder of The Young Women’s Breast Cancer Translational Program.
“These are women with babies and young children at home. If we lose them, we lose a wife, a mother and a worker.”
As Snyder met other pre-menopausal breast-cancer patients, she decided to invest her professional marketing skills in an awareness-raising campaign aimed at women under age 50. That campaign, Pink Colorado, was galvanized by the heated controversy about whether premenopausal women should get mammograms.
“We’re trying to bring a creative approach to talking about the importance of mammograms,” Snyder said.
“I’m no doctor, but it doesn’t seem right to wait until you’re 50 to get tested. At 40, you need to start once a year.”
She works out regularly with Charla Blizzard, another Eagle resident, who was 42 when she was diagnosed last February with Stage 3 breast cancer. Like Snyder, she was surprised; she associated the disease with much older women.
“I had kids late, so they called me a senior pregnancy; and now I’m considered a young cancer patient,” Blizzard said.
Both women are mothers of young children. Snyder’s daughters are 8 and 11 years old. Blizzard’s sons are ages 3, 6 and 7.
They have another friend and fellow Shaw Cancer Center patient, Ilse Cervante, 20, a Battle Mountain High School graduate who chose to have a double mastectomy upon learning that she carries a breast- cancer marker gene. Cervante submitted a photograph of jeans-clad fellow Battle Mountain alums. The photograph is featured in a Pink Colorado calendar that’s being sold as part of the campaign’s fund- raising effort.
“Just like a pair of jeans, breast cancer can be seen anywhere, and anyone can have it, and with the help of those beside you, you can fight it and beat it,” Cervante wrote in the text accompanying her photograph.
Eagle Valley effort
When Snyder began talking about her Pink Colorado concept late last year, Blizzard, Cervante, Carey and others immediately wanted to help.
As word spread, so did Eagle Valley business owners, artists, community leaders and others. More than 300 Colorado photographers responded to a call for entries for the Pink Colorado exhibit.
Twenty-seven images, plus 10 images by young photographers, were chosen to be dramatically enlarged — the biggest photograph is 20 by 26 feet — and mounted on Eagle buildings. The cost of enlargements was paid by Snyder’s employer, NRC 365, and by 27 corporate and business sponsors from a Vail dermatology clinic to Eagle’s Bonfire Brewing.
Every image includes the color pink — sometimes as subtle as Wendy Griffith’s image of a woman in a ski parka the hue of a cherry blossom, and sometimes as vivid as Eddie Mason’s picture of a huge pair of hot fuchsia ski goggles reflecting a run at Arapahoe Basin.
“I love that one,” Snyder said, looking fondly at the Mason photograph mounted on the side of a building in Eagle’s Dusty Boot neighborhood.
“I wanted these photographs to be more about art. Breast cancer doesn’t have to be sad and scary — well, it is sad and scary — but it can also be more. Having cancer changed my life in all the cliched ways — you don’t take things as seriously, you spend more quality time with your family, and it’s great every day when you wake up.”
Claire Martin: 303-954-1477 or cmartin@denverpost.com
Pink Colorado
Eagle’s Pink Colorado photographs will be on exhibit through Sept. 16. Want to see them?
From Denver, it’s about a two-hour drive west on Interstate 70 to Eagle (Exit 147; don’t confuse it with the Eagle/Vail community about 21 miles west of the town of Eagle.)
The display route is about a mile long, from Eagle’s town hall to Eagle Ranch Village.
When the exhibit ends, Snyder plans to repurpose the sturdy photographs into reusable tote bags. All the money raised from those sales and from a Pink Colorado calendar, will finance breast cancer research at the Aspen Komen center and the Colorado University Foundation for Young Women’s Research.
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