Pair makes powerful team for Paint the Park Pink

FORT SMITH — Best friends Patricia Brown and Vonda Gardner suffer no shortage of courage, spunk or perseverance.

With Brown battling breast cancer for the second time in her life — and Gardner by her side as her “co-survivor” — they aim to make a big “pink” at the Sept. 22 Paint the Park Pink, a family fun walk for breast cancer awareness on the campus of the University of Arkansas at Fort Smith.

The pair are honorary chairmwomen of the sixth annual event.

“It’s sort of like a smaller version of Race for the Cure,” explained Brown, COO of The City Wire.

Sounds pretty cut and dried, right?

Well, anyone who knows Brown knows she doesn’t do anything halfway. And her health challenges have only fueled her passion for bringing cancer issues to the forefront. However, the pretty blonde with a flair for the creative knows how to have fun, even in the face of adversity.

As she attests, most breast cancer survivors develop “a warped sense of humor that’s wacky. When you start thinking about losing your hair and losing your breast, you combat that with a lot of humor,” she said.

“You just shower yourself in gaudy pink and crowns and whatever, just to feel the freedom that cancer can give you,” she continued. “Freedom to be who you are, to express yourself. And in doing so, it becomes a very powerful public awareness vehicle that communicates that you can thrive and survive while you’re fighting.”

For the Paint the Park Pink, a breakfast for survivors and co-survivors commences at 8 a.m. with the walk to follow at 10 a.m. Other fun stuff to do and see: A kids’ play area, live music and sponsor booths. Co-survivors can be family members, spouses or partners, friends, health care providers or colleagues — anyone who is there to lend support from diagnosis through treatment and beyond.

The fundraising goal for the event is $75,000. Information on how to register can be found here.

Gardner is co-owner of the T.G.I. Friday’s restaurants in Fort Smith and Conway. Brown, a Fort Smith native, lived 24 years in Memphis, where she achieved great success with the Mid-South affiliate of the Make-A-Wish Foundation. In her 12 years with the organization, she was able to grant end-of-life wishes for some 2,000 terminally ill children.

“It’s always been my mission and purpose to help people. That’s how I’ve been all my life,” she said.

Brown’s first breast cancer diagnosis came in May of 2005. She underwent eight rounds of chemotherapy and had radiation and reconstruction of one breast. For the last seven years, she’s been considered “disease free.” She learned the cancer was back during a routine checkup in June. She’s now being treated at Highlands Oncology Group in Rogers and at M.D. Anderson Cancer Treatment Center in Houston.

You can follow her fight with cancer on her The City Wire blog here.

Much of what Brown has gone through she has documented in a large bound notebook/scrapbook.

“This was what I looked like before I was ever diagnosed,” she says, turning the plastic-covered pages. 

“I love that haircut,” she says of another. “That’s my favorite haircut of all time. I’m trying to get back to that look.”

Then she says, “There’s the fun one,” she says of herself in a photo of her bald. “I put it on The City Wire. I just put it out there. I got tired of people crying about losing their hair.

“I said, ‘It is awful.’ Emotionally, it’s the worst experience of the whole process. You take a shower and wash your hair and it all comes out in your hands. And then it all becomes real.

“You get out of the shower and you’re afraid to touch your hair. You’re afraid to do anything.”

“We’re all terminal. I preached that for 12 years while I was at Make-A-Wish,” she said. “In every speech I gave, I tried to make people aware of the fact that we’re terminal. Your life starts with the year you were born and it ends with the year you die and your dash in the middle is your life.

“Make your dash count.”