Umass cancer walk speech...for angLosarcoma

Hello, I’d like to take a moment and introduce myself to all of you. Some of you may know me, but the vast majority of you have never made my acquaintance. My name is Angiosarcoma. I am an incredibly rare cancer that starts in the lining of your blood vessels. I’m an equal opportunist and don’t discriminate, so no matter who you are or what you do, I may decide one day to visit your breast, or your spleen or your heart. In fact, I can show up anywhere in your body at any time of your life for reasons that remain secrets to me. No one is clever enough to unfold my mysteries, few have even tried. In this era of research and discovery, I’ve been left alone to invade whomever I please. I’m smart enough to keep myself under the radar, I know that if I select only a few people every year, no one will care enough to give their money and fund research that might discover my secrets, research that might help build an arsenal of drugs to attack me, that might bring the necessary awareness to the research community to eradicate me altogether. As a result of my adeptness, I will strip people of their lives with incredible speed. Unlike other cancers, I’m already in the blood, so I don’t have to figure out how to crawl through your tissue in order to metastasize. It doesn’t matter if you’re a marathon runner, if you eat organic vegetables, if you’re a mother with babies who look up at you with giant blue eyes and the sole expectation that you’ll be there to tuck them in the next night. It just doesn’t matter to me. I have one purpose and one purpose only, to ravage your body.
My greatest fear is that people like you will catch on to the fact that if you fund research for angiosarcoma, you might realize that by stopping me, by figuring out how I can form aberrant channels of blood vessels, by figuring out how I can manipulate the natural process of angiogenesis, you might actually build a vast array of weapons against all solid tumor derived cancers. My greatest fear is that people like Corrie Painter will get up in front of a generous group of people such as yourselves and tell you all about me. I like being an orphan, please, for the sake of my livelihood, don’t listen to her, whatever she has to say, I’ll silence anyways…just give it time.
(I’ll close this with a blurb about how you can find out more by talking to me or visiting www.angiosarcomaawarenwss.com)