Air Force vet raising funds for cancer treatment Saturday
Noemi Salazar, a former Moses Lake resident, will hold a fundraiser Saturday to help with cancer treatment costs.
COURTESY PHOTO/NOEMI SALAZAR
MOSES LAKE — Cancer is scary, but the standard treatments are no fun either. Chemotherapy, radiation, surgery — all take a severe toll on the human body. Disabled Air Force veteran Noemi Salazar is taking a different approach and needs the public’s help to do it.
“I’m hoping to raise enough funds to go to Hope4Cancer,” Salazar said. “They’re in Mexico. I’m choosing to dome some non-toxic therapies and it’s hard to find those things here.”
Salazar’s family has set up a GoFundMe page to collect money to help Salazar get the treatment she’s looking for, and there will be a fundraiser car wash in Moses Lake on Saturday with a raffle to kick in some more.
Salazar was diagnosed about a year ago with Stage 2B invasive ductal breast cancer, she said. She’s stable now, but with cancer, things can take a turn for the worse at any moment. The standard of care covered by most insurance is surgery, chemo and radiation, all of which are essentially damaging the body in the hope of damaging the cancerous parts more. The effects can be miserable and debilitating, and Salazar wasn’t in a good position to undergo that, she said.
“I have a 3-year-old, and I just couldn’t see myself taking care of a toddler while going through all that,” she said. “Especially since we’re a military family and I’m living in a totally different part of the country.”
Salazar grew up in Moses Lake, but she and her husband live now in Beaumont, Texas, where her husband recently retired from the Air Force. She has an oncologist through the Veterans Administration who monitors her progress, and so far, she’s doing well with lifestyle and diet changes, she said.
“I get blood work done every three months, and they’re monitoring the progress of the tumor,” she said. “They’re checking for tumor markers and things that are specific to the kind of cancer I have, and they’ve all come back in the normal ranges. But the risk remains while I have active cancer that it (would) spread to other parts of the body. I’m hoping that, if I were able to raise enough funds to go to Hope4Cancer, it would put it into remission.”
Hope4Cancer, with locations in Tijuana and Cancun, Mexico, uses a variety of methods of fighting cancer, according to its website. These include applications of low-level laser to the cancerous cells, killing them with ultrasound technology and using the body’s own immune system to fight off the cancer. The treatments take three weeks, and Salazar’s GoFundMe goal is $60,000.
Saturday’s fundraiser car wash will be held in the parking lot of Moses Lake Pediatric Dentistry on Stratford Road. Her family is also selling raffle tickets for a TV, the winner of which will be announced at the car wash.
“(This treatment) might be the thing that I need to push me over the edge, and then hopefully I can be done with cancer,” Salazar said.
Salazar’s GoFundMe page can be found at https://bit.ly/SalazarHope4Cancer
Fundraiser for Noemi Salazar
Moses Lake
Moses Lake Pediatric Dentistry
800 N. Stratford Road
July 5
10 a.m.-2 p.m.