In my previous posts, I mentioned how I became part of the Winchester Hospital Heelers Weekend to End Women’s Cancers team, and how over the past three years, our team raised more than $272,000, 75% of which – or $204,000 – was directed back to the Winchester District Memorial Hospital for cancer care right in our own community. I’m sure you’re wondering what our hospital has been doing with that money! I’ll get to that in a minute…
One of the things that is important to explain about the 60+ people that have been a part of our team over the past few years is that we come from all over the areas served by WDMH; we don’t all live in Winchester! Our team is made up of people from Iroquois, Morrisburg, Williamsburg, Chesterville, Finch, Mountain, South Mountain, Hallville, Osgoode, Greely, Russell, Crysler…and the list goes on. What we have in common is our commitment to our local hospital; our families have all been cared for at WDMH at one time or another – and such high-quality medical care, close to home – well, you just can’t put a price tag on that.
You might think that traveling to Ottawa for medical care isn’t really that big a deal…but it can be. When you have to tack a minimum of two hours onto the travel time required for each medical appointment, and then you have to deal with the additional expense of traveling at least 100 km roundtrip, that’s only the beginning. You’re a very long way from home if your appointment runs late and you can’t get back home to pick up your kids from daycare on time. It just adds a whole other level of stress.
We have a high incidence of breast cancer in our communities, and it’s no secret that early detection is key to increasing survival rates. So when the Winchester Hospital decided to use the funds raised by our team to finance a new digital mammography machine, we knew that we would be changing lives. Saving lives.
Having a digital mammography machine at our local hospital means that women (and men) now receive the same caliber of medical imaging in Winchester that is available in Ottawa. We no longer have to worry about the possibility of compromising the quality of our medical care, just because we opted to have our tests carried out closer to home. And people who may have foregone more advanced testing in the past because it was too inconvenient to travel to the city now have easier access to that testing. And I haven’t even mentioned wait times! Any way you look at it, it’s a win-win.
A digital mammography machine costs about half a million dollars, no small drop in the bucket. By the end of this year’s Weekend event on June 5th and 6th, we hope to have financed about 60% of that cost through our fundraising. And we have no plans to stop, either, because we know that our efforts will save lives. Let me say that again… our efforts will save lives. We’re just ordinary people, yet we have the potential to save lives. How awesome is that?
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