Norine V. Rathbone is not your ordinary athlete.
She's not an ordinary woman either—
While Major League Baseball has pink-painted wood bats being swung on Mother's Day by professional baseball-playing men in honor of breast cancer awareness, Norine is the living breathing version of those MLB pink bats.
Essentially—SHE IS A REAL LIVE PINK BAT!
A breast cancer survivor herself since January 17, 2001 when she underwent a double mastectomy that saved her life, she is also a real life baseball player for the Las Vegas Sandvipers men's baseball team under the general management of Gary Arlitz, who is a skin cancer survivor himself.
The Las Vegas Sandvipers 25+ American team is comprised of men (and one woman) from ages 25-40 with Norine being the oldest at a young 53 years of age. She started playing baseball in the MSBL, an national men's baseball organization of some 45,000 men playing hardball nationwide back in January of 2000.
At the end of her rookie year she did a routine mammogram that came up positive for breast cancer. Determined to make spring training in 2001 she did her surgeries and cancer treatments. It's one thing to be discriminated against as a woman trying to play a man's game but to have one's body now be the biggest discriminator of all well that just made her mad enough to fight back.
And she did... With a cancer-fighting champion vengence!
With the tenacity of a champion prize fighter, she fought back taking on her chemotherapy treatments like each one was a title fight. Not one to back down from a challenge, radiation treatments fell to her athletic determination to complete the 6.5 weeks of daily doses.
Today Norine is cancer free. But she has a new mission concerning breast cancer awareness. It's about having a plate appearance at one or all of the Major League Stadiums one Mother's Day at a time, in full baseball uniform with her own personlized wood-painted pink bat taking a swing at cancer.
Why? Because it's the right thing to do—have a real live breast cancer survivor who is also a real live baseball player as a real live symbolism of the heart and soul of one who has done the torture for the cure to get to the race for the cure.
Because she wants to share about people who are alive like herself—thanks to your donations to breast cancer research.
Will you help her realize her own
MLB baseball dream by telling
Major League Baseball to let her
swing their pink bat in one of their
stadiums on a Mother's Day...
Norine hit a grand slam interview on National Cancer Survivors Day for Nevada Cancer Institute, June 5, 2011. You gotta see it to believe! Click the Breaking Baseball link above...
She may never hit a real baseball home run but her interview segment grand slam she hit out of the baseball of life ball park went over huge!
Thank you KLAS 8 News Las Vegas for featuring Nevada Cancer Institute and A Real Live Pink Bat.
"Cancer can destroy the body
but it cannot kill the heart."
my personal life mantra
