Reaching a milestone

Saturday will mark the 11th time Rose Henry has walked in Relay for Life of Southwest Iowa as a survivor.

After hitting her goal of 10 years of survivor laps during last year’s Relay for Life event, Henry decided to commemorate the achievement in a special way.

Henry took the T-shirts given out to cancer survivors from those 10 years and assembled a “survivor” T-shirt quilt.

“It means I’ve hit a goal. My oncologist set me free at 10 years,” Henry said. “So, it’s a culmination of what went on those years. There’s two or three shirts on there that people had given me and they have special meaning just because of my support system I had at the time.”

Henry has been proudly displaying the quilt this week in the large window of her office at the Creston News Advertiser.

Relay for Life of Southwest Iowa begins 3 p.m. Saturday at Creston Community High School with the Cancer Sucks Car Show. Survivor registration is from 3 to 4:15 p.m., and the festivities begin with an opening prayer at 4:30 p.m. In the event of rain, the event will be moved inside to the CCHS gymnasium.

Henry said she came up with the idea for the T-shirt quilt after about eight or nine years of walking in Relay for Life as a survivor, when she began to ponder what she was going to do with all of her shirts.

She had been making T-shirt quilts as graduation gifts and decided to make one for herself when she had enough shirts.

“It was emotional,” Henry said about working on her quilt. “Almost every year there’s a little pin they give you. I didn’t have a couple of them, so I found out later they didn’t give them out that year, which is why I didn’t have them. I actually went on eBay and found a couple. I think I’m still short one.”

Henry assembled the quilt quickly, in about three or four weeks. Her sister Diane, who Henry said was her biggest supporter when she was fighting cancer, had just bought a new long arm machine and wanted to practice with it on a T-shirt quilt.

“She quilted little pink ribbons throughout it, which I thought was pretty neat,” Henry said. “She was my biggest supporter and helped me through a lot of crap. It was nice that she did it (the quilting).”

Henry said she is already considering making another “survivor” quilt in the future; she’ll just have to keep collecting T-shirts and see how many she gets.

As for Relay for Life, Henry loves the camaraderie of everyone involved.

“Just the support system that shows for everybody, even the survivors supporting each other,” she said. “A lot of people understand what’s going on there. It’s just like it’s a big group of people getting together that knows what you’ve gone through or what they’re going through.”