Sun Valley Magazine salutes Sue McCollum.
• For seeing hope for others during a moment of fear in her life.
• For embodying that hope in a hand-blown glass globe covered with cobalt blue dots like the blue tattoos the doctors placed on her to guide the radiation to treat her breast cancer.
• For establishing the Sue McCollum Blue Dot Fund and donating funds from private gifts as well as from the sale of these globes to cancer research at Stanford University Medical Center.
• For making a video, with the help of videographer John Plummer and writer director Damian Bisch, to be viewed on the World Wide Web that tells her personal story but represents the story of seven million women who are not here to tell their story.
• For chronicling her journey in a book of poetry, Moving On . . . before and after cancer, and making a CD of that book.
• For not giving up, even after losing her mother to breast cancer and her father to pancreatic cancer, then getting her own diagnosis of breast cancer in 1999.
• For alerting all to the fact that although the odds for women developing breast cancer with a history of the disease in their family is high . . . 80 percent of women diagnosed with breast cancer have no history of the disease in their family.
• For making the blue dots a badge of courage and a symbol of hope for the millions who wear the blue dot tattoos.
• For being proactive by asking people to envision a world without cancer and to help fund that vision. • For inviting all to share her vision of a world without cancer.