Your body tells you that something just isn’t right. Perhaps it’s a mole or lump on your breast or an enlarged prostate gland. It could be your physical sluggishness or that always-rundown feeling. Maybe it’s the weight that you’ve quickly lost without even trying.

Your body warns others. Something just isn’t right with your blood tests, breast exams or X-rays, CAT scans and MRIs.

Then, one day, the news slams you in the gut. You’ve got Stage 3 cancer of the pancreas that has spread to the lungs. The dots on the X-rays don’t lie, although you pray they do as you search for a doctor to give you a second opinion. As you wait for a biopsy to ascertain if the tumor is malignant or benign, you go through the various emotional stages of anger, sympathy, denial, optimism and depression.

The results — good or bad — strangely produce similar introspection of dreaded terror and finality. We all — the haves and have nots — are touched and emotionally scarred by cancer.

That’s why the American Cancer Society’s Relay For Life is the most popular community fundraiser in Tracy. Already, more than $114,000 has been pledged online toward the $395,000 goal for the three-day event that began Friday night at Peter B. Kyne Field at Tracy High School and continues through Sunday morning. Most of the activities are today, beginning with the opening survivors’ walk around the track at 10 a.m. Before it ends at 10 a.m. Sunday, there will be 24 hours of ceremonial and pledge-collecting circles of the quarter-mile track and a beehive of activity on the infield and at the tent city that went up Friday night.

At the event, the community raises money to help the American Cancer Society to save lives, help those who have been touched by cancer and empower individuals to fight back. Also important is remembering those lost to cancer and celebrating those who have survived through comforting and consoling.

It’s the moment for Tracy residents to show their cancer battle scars — physical and emotional. It’s also the moment to pledge to provide scientists with the resources to find a cure for cancer, educate the world on ways to prevent it and assist those who have it.

Tracy’s highly successful Relay For Life is our opportunity to look cancer squarely in the eye with the confidence that we will never succumb to it. Join us in taking the fight to the disease by participating or donating to Relay For Life.