More than Pink walk to raise funds for, awareness of breast cancer in O.C.

Sol Reyes-Roberts did everything right.

The Laguna Beach resident started her mammograms at 40, and when she got a breast cancer diagnosis, she let others around her in on the secret.

Seventeen years later, Reyes-Roberts is not only surviving but thriving, becoming an advocate for others facing a similar situation.

Reyes-Roberts, a retired nurse, continues to foster community through a group called Cafecitos Hope, which has provided support for Latina women in their battle with breast cancer with regular meetings in Santa Ana.

Over the course of the past 11 years, Reyes-Roberts has met with more than 100 women through Cafecitos Hope. The group currently boasts a few dozen among its ranks.

“My focus [in] nursing has always been the community, it has been more in terms of teaching,” Reyes-Roberts said. “So what I learned, what I experienced, I wanted to share because that was the way that calmed me down, that was the way that I felt I needed to give back to my community because when you give, you get, and that is my philosophy.”

Sol Reyes-Roberts, a retired nurse and breast cancer survivor, leads a support group for Latina women called Cafecitos Hope.

(Don Leach / Staff Photographer)

Reyes-Roberts sees a far different landscape than the one she inherited when she received her diagnosis in 2007.

“There’s so many different treatments,” she said. “Nowadays, [patients] don’t even have to take chemotherapy. They could take immunotherapy, and that helps them. … A lot of them don’t need to have really radical treatments. They could get something a little bit more tolerable.”

The former nurse leaned into her inclination to educate, teaching women in the group how to talk to their doctor. Reyes-Roberts recently advised one woman to take her husband with her to an appointment, rather than her 18-year-old daughter, because the latter was too young and could be exposed to trauma.

She also brought in nursing colleagues to speak to the women of Cafecitos Hope.

Cafecitos Hope will be among the many groups participating in the Susan G. Komen More Than Pink walk on Sunday. The event will take place at Fashion Island in Newport Beach.

Megan Klink, Susan G. Komen’s vice president of community development strategy and the West region, praised groups working to raise awareness within their communities.

Megan Klink, vice president of the West region for Susan G. Komen, and Sol Reyes-Roberts, a retired nurse and breast cancer survivor, take a walk in Costa Mesa on Tuesday.

(Don Leach / Staff Photographer)

“The grassroots community work is so critically important because you have to build trust within communities,” Klink said. “That education piece, it becomes almost like peer to peer, even if you haven’t been diagnosed with breast cancer, just dispelling myths around cancer in community, so that if someone you know, or you yourself down the line is eventually diagnosed … then you know what to do and to take action for your breast health.”

Nearly $700,000 had been raised in support of Susan G. Komen, a nonprofit organization that advocates and provides services for patients of breast cancer, in advance of the Orange County “More Than Pink” walk as of Friday evening.

Registration will open at 7 a.m. on the day of the event, followed by an opening ceremony at 8:30 a.m. The walk begins at 9 a.m.

“It’s not too late to register and join us and come out because you do not have to be one of to stand with,” Klink said. “I think that at the end of the day, this is about community and community coming together and supporting one another. I think the Cafecitos Hope group is like the most beautiful example of that.”

Komen provided more than $750,000 in financial assistance to 1,332 breast cancer patients in California in the most recent fiscal year. Its patient care center provided 2,578 services to more than 2,000 individuals statewide.

“We know that if you are connected to a patient navigator, that navigator is going to take hold of your hand and make sure that you’re going to get navigated into care and stay in care,” Klink said. “... We know that navigation is the clearest path [to survival] because what we find is when you have barriers to care, then that’s when women either don’t get into care soon enough, or they stop going to care.”