FUNDRAISER
runners asking about a shirt she wears bearing the photo of her second-born son, Connor.
The customized tee reads, “This is the new face of colorectal cancer.”
“I tell Connor’s story to everyone I meet,” said Taylor, 57, a medical technologist and mother of four boys.
In February 2016, at age 22, Connor Taylor learned that he had colorectal cancer. Seven months later, he was dead of complications resulting from a procedure related to the disease.
On Sunday, Carleen Taylor, along with husband Mark and their three surviving sons, will host the 5-kilometer Race for Hope Derriere Dash, a benefit for colorectal-cancer research, at Upper Arlington High School.
The event — which also features a 1-mile dash — is one that Taylor founded 13 years ago, long before her son’s diagnosis.
It originated in 2004 as the Peggy Bock Memorial Race for Hope, in honor of a sorority sister from college who lost her battle with the same disease just a few weeks before the inaugural run.
“It’s the worst kind of irony,” Carl Bock, Peggy’s husband, said from his home in Cleveland. He and his wife lived in the Cleveland area at the time of her diagnosis, but Peggy graduated from Upper Arlington High and the couple met while attending Ohio State University.
After losing her dear friend, Taylor began advocating for those under 50 who have colorectal cancer, which is typically thought of as an older person’s disease. (Health guidelines recommend colonoscopies beginning at age 50.)
Besides the run — held annually since 2004, save for one year when her mother was ill —Taylor has hosted a Blue for the Night educational fundraiser for the past five years and managed to get the lights atop the LeVeque Tower turned blue (the color symbolizing colorectal cancer) in March for Colorectal Cancer Awareness Month.
Taylor estimates that the run has generated about $100,000, which she has donated to hospitals, research facilities and organizations that help people with colorectal cancer.
When the race reached its 10th anniversary, Carl Bock wondered whether Taylor might want a break from the yearly commitment.
“I told Carleen, ‘You’ve been doing this a long time, and no one would blame you for stopping,’” he said. “But she’s relentless. Her passion is unwavering — and then to throw on top of it what happened with Connor, it’s rough. But she just keeps going. “She digs in.” Taylor calls her son’s diagnosis a “cruel twist” of fate.
Peggy Bock was only 42 when Taylor learned in 2002 that her Alpha Gamma Delta sorority sister was ill. At the time, Bock had four young boys herself at home who were close in age to Taylor’s four.
“I immediately put myself in her spot,” Taylor said. “She would talk to me, and she was very scared. She didn’t want her kids to grow up without her. I needed to do something to raise awareness — do something to give her hope and to look forward to.”
Taylor’s mission, she said, was undeniable: to make other people aware that colorectal cancer affects people of all ages and let young adults know what symptoms to look for and how to advocate for proper screening.
In late 2015, Connor — who had graduated that May from Ohio State with a degree in public health and was applying to graduate programs — began complaining of nausea and recurring heartburn.
His mother made him go to the doctor for blood work. She had to push many times for additional testing for Connor, she said, until a fecal test detected blood in his stool; his doctor recommended a colonoscopy.
Connor had the procedure done on Jan. 30, 2016, and, four days later, the family received the devastating news.
“For younger people, this tends to be how it presents,”
Taylor said. “They don’t have the standard of lots of blood in their stools. Of course, if you see blood in your stool, you go to the doctor. But that’s not how it’s appearing.
“We need to start gathering research on how these kids are presenting and what to do to make diagnosing better.”
According to an article published in 2014 by the Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minn., more than a tenth of colorectal cases (11 percent of colon cancers and 18 percent of rectal cancers) occur in people younger than 50.
These rates are still drastically lower than the rates for older people, but the rates for older people are declining as those for younger populations are rising. The National Cancer Institute reports the the rates of colorectal cancer in those ages 20-49 increased from 9.7 per 100,000 people in 2003 to 12.9 in 2014.
Never Too Young for Colon Cancer, a campaign with the Colorectal Cancer Alliance for which Taylor serves on the advisory board, estimates that, by 2030, colon and rectal cancers will increase by 90 percent (the former) and 124 percent (the latter) among those 20 to 34 and by 28 percent and 46 percent among those 35-49.
Although Taylor had thought about discontinuing the fundraising run several times through the years, the disheartening projections for occurrence, she said, motivated her to keep at it. Her son’s death two months before the 2016 event also refueled her drive.
“We need to get the word out,” she said. “Here’s this 23-year-old who suffered. We need to bring awareness to this even more.”
Liz Maxwell was more than happy to help Taylor with the cause.
Maxwell, a co-worker of Taylor’s at LabCorp, received a colon-cancer diagnosis at age 33; she’s now 59.
The message that Taylor champions — one of listening to your body and speaking up — is so important, Maxwell said.
“I had just had my first baby and thought maybe I was just a nervous new mother,” she said, “but I had a change in bowel habits. A lot of people don’t feel comfortable talking about that system of the body, but you are your only advocate.”
Besides the run and dash, the event will feature speakers from the medical community as well as survivors. It isn’t always easy to put together, what with corporate sponsors and volunteers coming and going as the years pass.
Plus, Taylor said, her grief over her son “is crippling.”
“I get home from work, and I’ll say, ‘I’ve got to call this person and this person.’ Then, I cry for two hours.”
But Connor, she says, spurs her on.
Last year, after the first race without him, she and about 40 of her sorority sisters gathered at an area restaurant, where they were waited on by servers named Connor and Taylor.
Carl Bock will attend the race on Sunday, too, to again help his friend in the fight that will forever bind them.
“She’s had quite a few reasons to quit this,” Bock said. “The race, it is about Peggy — but, really, it is bigger than that.
“It’s about letting people know about this silent killer.”