If there’s one thing we can all support, it’s toothfairies. That’s right, there’s not just one – how would one fairy have time to exchange millions of little teeth for cold, hard cash every night?
But we’re not talking about those toothfairies. We’re talking about the kind who have been pounding the pavement for 16 years trying to finish the fight against breast cancer.
The Making Strides Against Breast Cancer team was started by Dr. Roger Achong of Concord Pediatric Dentistry. Achong was asked back in 1999 to join Nalda Levy’s team, the Warriors, to help support the cause – Levy is a survivor herself. Achong and friends walked with her team for one year, and he was so impressed by how motivated everyone was that he thought he should create a team of his own.
He didn’t want to give it a corporate, business-type name like Dr. Achong’s Dental Practice or something like that. He wanted to go with something more generic, more fun.
And so the Toothfairies team was born.
“With that name I invited the entire Concord dental society to walk with us,” Achong said.
From there, things kind of took off. Some dentists, after walking with the Toothfairies, wanted to branch off and start their own teams – “which is great,” Achong said.
As the Toothfairies team got bigger and bigger over the years, some dental offices didn’t feel as comfortable walking with such a crowd, so they created their own teams – “which is totally cool also,” Achong said.
“We don’t consider ourselves a competition with any other team,” Achong said. “We’re all there to enhance or complement each other, because we all have the same goal, the same cause, and we actually consider ourselves, at least myself, a subgroup – we consider the Warriors our mothership.”
Because of Levy’s survivor story, Achong said the act of taking a picture with her each year turned into a tradition. It was Levy, the cancer fighter, who inspired the creation of the Toothfairies, and so it only seemed right to get pictures with her and her husband, Dr. Cliff Levy, every year.
“We try to get their photo to show or celebrate that we’re all here as a gift from God and we can celebrate life, and hopefully, stomp out this disease,” Achong said.
This year, the Tooth Fairies of Concord Pediatric Dentistry, as the team is now known, will have 51 sets of feet trying to stomp out the disease. Sounds like a lot, right? Achong said it’s a decent size for a team, but certainly not the biggest he’s seen. But again, like he said, it’s not a competition – everyone is on the same team in this fight and working toward the same goal.
The team grew over the years mostly by word of mouth, Achong said. When it began as a handful of dentists and their families, it didn’t take long for those participants to start telling friends, who then told their friends and so on. Next thing you know, there’s 50 some odd people walking with the team.
Last year was the first time the team name included the name of the practice, which is a sponsor of the event. And although that gets away from the more lighthearted nature of the original team name, the identity and spirit of the team is still there. It also helps attract more attention to the cause, Achong said.
“We do this in the office as a dental office to make parents more aware of it, and children,” he said. “Just like how we want to get rid of cavities – banish those cavities – we hope that one day breast cancer can be a thing of the past, because unfortunately we don’t have a cure.”
Another unfortunate reality is that the disease is quite common – most everybody knows at least one person who has been affected by it. But it isn’t necessarily an instant death sentence, either – Levy was diagnosed way back in the ’90s, and here she is today, still going strong, still fighting hard.
“Maybe my mom, or my wife, or my daughter might be a patient of breast cancer, and so we’re trying to prevent that,” Achong said.
“We have quite a number of families that come to us, and their mom – actually one family the dad was affected by breast cancer, so we know the effects of how it can affect a family.”
Often, even the word cancer – you know, the C-word – can cause great emotional stress and pain. Maybe something reminds you one day that there’s a history of it in your family. Maybe you hear talk about it in passing and it reminds you of a loved one lost.
“Just the word cancer can be a very powerful, emotional experience, just hearing that from a physician,” Achong said.
Achong knows that there’s only so much we can do to help in this fight, but he doesn’t let that discourage him, or anyone else on his team for that matter.
“I would want to empower my staff to feel that we can help our community not just as a dental office, but just as regular folks,” he said. “We can go out there and do something else besides dentistry, and walking and financially supporting the cause for Making Strides, I think that’s something great that we can share with the community.”
Achong and his family – plus the more than 40 others on the team – will be out there Sunday with all of the other teams at Memorial Field, just like they have been so many times before. And there’s no plan to slow down any time soon.
Achong said he’d like to continue to walk with this team and keep up the fight as long as he can, and inspire others to do the same.
“We want to show other communities that they can do as well as us, or even better.”
