Salon to host FMC’s Breast Center bus this Friday
F.H.F. Hair Design owner Hal Floyd hears the stories of tragedy from the barber chairs where his clients sit all the time.
He listens to the tales of an unknown mass being found in the mammary glands, or of a tumor that is discovered too late for a person to recover from. He’s heard of families losing a parent, a child, a brother and sister to all forms of cancer, and helped survivors try and regain a sense of normalcy while they sit and get a wig styled to their liking in order to hide the hair loss from chemotherapy and radiation treatments.
These are the types of stories he hopes in part to help bring to happy endings instead of ones of loss, and to help save his clients from unnecessary suffering.
“It’s not even about breast cancer. I’ve had experiences with clients lately who are going through colon cancer and prostate cancer,” Floyd said. “We lost Lisa Saucier Johnson not long ago, and she was a client for several years. And being involved with her and her plight for the last several months really and helping her (made an impact.)”
So this Friday, Floyd and his salon are hosting a Cancer Awareness Day in hopes of gaining greater understanding in the community of not just breast cancer as the awareness month gets closer to an end, but all varieties.
That includes Floyd Medical Center’s Breast Center bus, which includes mobile mammography equipment. They’ll be in Cedartown on Main Street from 9 a.m. to 3 p.m.
“I’ve worked with women the past 2o plus years, and I can say for the last five years I’ve seen breast cancer hit harder and harder in families,” he said. “I’m really getting people to understand the BRCA (pronounced BARCAH) gene can be identified now early on that way if you have breast cancer, the operations can take place and kids don’t have to see you in a declining health state.”
Floyd said he hoped that with awareness raised among his clientele of the need to be screened regularly for all kinds of cancer, it might just save lives. The experience this coming Friday is also meant as a way to ensure that those who are going through hard times have an opportunity to feel like themselves again.
“It’s about getting their self confidence back in a time of need,” he said. “Sometimes women just want to feel like women, and you take away the femininity when your hair falls away, or your eyebrows. So I want everyone to know that you can still be beautiful in that time of need.”
A recent addition to the staff at F.H.F. Hair Design in Destiny Whatley provides clientele with additional help since she is able to work on real human hair wigs, “that can be sewn in such a way to look like the client’s hair before it was lost.”
Along with the bus arriving on Friday for screenings — free for those with an insurance card, a $100 fee up front and a “modest radiological fee will be billed and sent to your home” to receive a mammogram — Floyd also has a raffle of products available in his salon worth upward of $400.
Tickets sales have already raised $600 and all money goes toward funding child cancer research, Floyd said. Hourly door prizes are available as well.
“If you take care of this ahead of time, your family doesn’t have to go through this tragedy,” he said.
Clients will also be in during Friday’s event to come in and share their experiences as survivors of breast cancer too, Floyd said.
They also wished to thank Tammy Thornton for her help in getting the Breast Center bus to Polk County, along with Stephanie Clay-Weaver as well.
“I want to make it an annual event every year,” Floyd said. “It is for anyone in this population. And Polk County is hit so hard by cancer, more so I think than other surrounding counties sometimes. I think it is something we should all pay attention to.”