Five years ago England Regional Volunteer Manager Wendy Lodder died of thymic carcinoma, a particularly rare chest cancer which affects one in a million people. Her good friend Sarah Bennett, who was the PGA Captain in 2022, has been raising funds and increasing awareness ever since.
To date Bennett has helped raise just short of £50,000 through a collection of efforts which have included running a half marathon, walking 15 miles on what would have been Wendy's birthday and she has just held a fifth golf day at Colchester GC where Bennett grew up and is now an honorary member.
The winners on the day were ironically three women who Bennett introduced to the game and they were playing in their first competition – part of their prizes were tickets to the PGA Championship at Wentworth.
But, beyond the tens of thousands that Bennett has helped to raise, the former Ladies European Tour player and leading coach is now making great strides towards pushing the research forward.
"It is such a rare cancer that it has never been looked at. Before Wendy passed away she told me that she wanted me to put any money towards the research and not, in her words, towards 'some tables and chairs'.
"Research has never been done into the analysis of the tumour. I have teamed up with Guy's Cancer Centre in London and I've been working with a Japanese pathologist and an Italian surgeon who are doing the research. One bit of exciting news is that two captains have chosen it as their charity for their year.
"The other is that we've been invited to the Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center in New York for the thymic worldwide conference where we're actually going to present the fact that we’re doing this. This is the biggest cancer research facility in the world and this has never been done before so it gives me goosebumps really. The medics don’t even teach about it yet as it’s so rare, it sits under the breastbone and can’t diagnose it until it’s late on or it gets diagnose it by chance.
"Because of Covid it’s now being diagnosed as people are having more chest X-rays and there will be a mass underneath the sternum."
Lodder, who was a keen golfer herself with a handicap of 6, was a hugely popular figure in and out of the game and that, along with Bennett's persistence, has helped spread the word of the battle against Thymic Cancer.
"Wendy worked for Citibank and managed 900 people, she was such a people person and she was great at helping with our squads. On our first golf day five years ago we had 120 people who had entered in the first 45 minutes. The phone never stopped and the snooker legend Steve Davis played.
"We're now in our fifth year and we're nearly at £50,000. There haven't been any huge donations nor corporate involvement, it's just been golf club members and hard-working people who have got behind this. It's just a lovely story, from a very sad one, of how the golf community has come together.
"Our last link for donations was for Wendy’s Thymic Fundraiser and I went into the bank and said that I’d like to pay money into WTF and she just looked at me! That would have been Wendy’s sense of humour to a tee."
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