Running for her life

Sandi Carter has been outrunning breast cancer for 18 years.

The Laguna Beach resident was diagnosed with the disease one year before the first Susan Komen Race for the Cure, which is now in its 17th year. The race is Sunday at Fashion Island in Newport Beach.

After a double mastectomy and six surgeries — for the treatment and follow-up restorative plastic surgery — you’d think the last thing she’d want would be to run in a 5K race.

But she did — and won in the survivor’s division.

And she kept on winning — placing first in the survivor’s category in six more consecutive races.

“Every race was a milestone, a year of survivorship,” Carter said. “It was big for me to get to No. 7.”

A teacher when she was diagnosed in 1990, Carter says she changed a lot about her life after learning she had a potentially terminal illness.

“When you’re diagnosed, it’s bone-chilling,” she said.

“It’s like ice water down the back of your neck. It’s a confrontation with mortality.”

She retired from teaching and started doing things she wanted to — like running, playing tennis, skiing, and going into business for herself, becoming a distributor for an air purifier manufacturer.

She even changed her license plate, to “JUSTDOT,” shorthand for the familiar phrase “Just do it.”

The diagnosis was a wake-up call to her to make the rest of her life the best that it could be.

“It was life-changing in a good way,” she said of the cancer.

“I had more urgency in my life, I looked at barriers I had set up for myself.”

She started getting into athletics, coaching the cross-country team at Laguna Beach High School. She started spending a month every year in Vail, Colo., treating herself to a ski vacation.

“I went into sports as an adult, and it helped in my recovery,” she said. “It was taking responsibility to stay healthy and fit.”

She feels lucky that she was diagnosed very early in the disease, and did not have to endure radiation or chemotherapy. Her treatment, while disfiguring, was more bearable for her than the alternatives.

Through the years, she has watched as cancer detection has become more precise, and treatments more individualized.

“Over 17 years, treatment options have taken major milestones,” she said. “Back then, they would ‘Rambo’ someone with cancer,” referring to an all-out assault that would take its toll on the patient.

If she were to face cancer again, she would still have that moment of ice water, but she would know the territory, and have the support of numerous friends as well as her family.

Her four children — two daughters and two sons — have been with her all the way, cheering her on at the annual race and being part of the extended family of breast cancer survivors that makes up the 30,000-strong participants in the race. Both daughters have run in the race.

It’s been a banner year in her family: One son was married in June and her daughter, Kendra, is pregnant with a second child and due at any moment. The baby will be a girl, and Carter feels she is now running the race for three generations.

This year, she is raising funds by organizing a team, called “Grand Slam,” with friends who are also tennis buffs.

Having lost a good friend to pancreatic cancer over the summer, Carter is well aware that, for all the advances, the disease is still deadly.

“The race isn’t won yet,” she said. “We’re still running, but making giant strides.”

CINDY FRAZIER is city editor of the Coastline Pilot. She can be contacted at (949) 494-2087 or cindy.frazier@latimes.com.