Barbara Barrett postponed her mastectomy to walk in the Avon Walk for Breast Cancer just months after she found a lump in her right breast.

She discovered the lump in September 2011 while vacationing in Montana and was diagnosed with cancer the next month. She doesn’t remember what inspired her to sign up for the Avon Walk – a commercial or a flier or something else – but she wanted to tackle the two-day walk while she was still fighting cancer.

“I needed to do it while it was still an open wound, so to speak,” said Barrett, a Genoa resident since 1997. “I was bald; I was the quintessential person to be out there doing this.”