Handley High classmates help out their friend
Posted: October 10, 2012
Star staff report
Winchester — Patients fighting breast cancer have plenty to worry about: Is the treatment working? How will I pay the bills? How is my family holding up?
One Handley High School graduate doesn’t have to worry about who her true friends are.
The Handley High School Class of 1995 will hold a spaghetti dinner to help out their classmate Tabby Starks, who was diagnosed with breast cancer earlier this year.
The Fight Like a Girl spaghetti dinner takes place from 4 to 7 p.m. Saturday in the Family Life Center at the Winchester Church of God, 2080 North Frederick Pike.
Cost is $8 for adults and $5 for children 12 and under.
Starks, 36, discovered a lump in her right breast in December 2011 while conducting a self-exam during a tanning bed session, said her friend Vivian Walker, one of the Handley friends organizing the dinner.
Starks thought the lump would go away, but when it was still there in January she made an appointment with a physician.
It was Stage 2 breast cancer. She had a lumpectomy as well as chemotherapy and radiation, Walker said.
At a follow-up visit to the doctor she found out the cancer had returned. In August, she had a mastectomy of her right breast.
Unable to work while she fights her illness, Starks, a single mom, needs help paying for insurance co-pays and for keeping up with the activities of her two teenagers, Walker said.
Walker herself knows a bit about the generosity of her classmates. When she was sick a few years ago, they held a fundraiser to help her with her bills.
“I feel like it’s time to pay it forward,” she said.