A Valley business owner is advocating for people with breast cancer in a unique way – and everyone is truly saying, “Well done!”

Don’t be surprised if you spot a sea of ​​pink this weekend in Chandler.

“It’s like a big wave of pink people crawling from bar to bar,” says Darwin Wall, broker with the Darwin Wall Team and founder of the Save Second Base Pub Crawl.

“I wanted to give back to the community while doing something fun,” Wall says.

And it’s also something with a purpose: to help advocate for Valley women living with breast cancer.

“I hope it makes a huge difference. I feel like it does. The expenses are high. The insurance doesn’t cover much. They always seem very grateful.”

Gretchen Weidman emailed the ABC15 editorial team to let us know about this event. She is the 2024 winner.

Weidman admits she went ten years without having a mammogram. As a single mom and full-time hairstylist, it’s not always easy to put yourself first — and many women can relate to that.

“It was really difficult,” Weidman says of the diagnosis. “Your mind goes through it all like a movie – it moves really fast and you think about what it would be like if you got really sick.”

Weidman was diagnosed with stage I breast cancer, but it had already started to spread to some lymph nodes. She would undergo surgery, radiation and chemotherapy.

Weidman admits that losing her hair and the intensity of the chemotherapy drugs scared her the most.

And in what can only be described in the world of hairdressing as a “mow act of bravery,” Weidman documented every step of the process of bravely saying goodbye to her hair.

“I didn’t know I had a really nice scalp underneath and so when that happened I thought, ‘I really love you without hair’… I had to realize that that doesn’t work. made me or broke me, whether I made it or not.”

And cancer didn’t make it or break it either.

As Weidman marks one year since her diagnosis, the pub crawl is an opportunity for her to celebrate how far she’s come.

“It gives me time to celebrate with people, to say, ‘I don’t have this anymore, I can let go and really rejoice and I’m done now!’

If you would like to participate in the 11^th The annual Save Second Base Pub Crawl this Saturday, October 19 will take place in downtown Chandler. It goes from 12 p.m. to 7 p.m. For more information, visit SaveSecondBasePubCrawl.com.

Save second base