PERRYSBURG – The Salon Professional Academy located in the Country Charm Shoppes Plaza will be the
setting for a jam-packed Breast Cancer Awareness Event this Thursday from 1 to 4:30 p.m.
Academy owner Denise Soto has long been a champion in the fight against breast cancer, helping to raise
money and awareness, and even hosting oncology nights for women who are losing their hair due to chemo,
most recently at their other Perrysburg business, Soto: The Salon and Spa.
But now she has a special reason for wanting to educate her students about the insidious disease which
strikes with frightening regularity.
"One woman is diagnosed every three minutes," Soto pointed out.
In May of this year she herself received such a diagnosis and the months since then have been filled with
the first of several stages of planned treatment.
Her chemotherapy regimen is 50 percent complete. "I have three more Taxol treatments. Then I’ll have
surgery, probably in December," followed by radiation.
"I feel really strong about where I’m at."
Still, the cancer was not discovered early even though Soto has known something was wrong for nearly two
years now and was seen by a number of different specialists, all searching for something else.
"I talk openly about my breast cancer with the students" and the lengthy list of activities
planned for Thursday is a deliberate follow-up to her candor.
Planned are:
¥ Unveiling of bras decorated by academy students;
¥ The opening of a silent auction;
¥ Hot dogs and hamburgers;
¥ A prize raffle;
¥ A breast cancer awareness walk, with the students walking from the academy to the park and back;
¥ $1 donation for balloons, with hidden prizes inside.
"We will also have breast cards so the students can feel what different types of breast lumps feel
like," Soto said. "My own tumor was in the muscle (underlying the breast), so you couldn’t
feel it" in a manual exam.
"We’d love to have the public be a part of it," she added. "If they stop by on Thursday
we’d like them to give a $5 donation" to the fight against breast cancer.
Soto’s husband, Charlie, admitted this is a "very emotional time" for the couple but they are
hoping to make something good come out of the pain.
"Beyond teaching (the students) a life skill, we want to arm them with information so they, in turn,
can reach out to their clients" in a knowledgeable, sensitive way, he noted.
"Statistics tell us that one in seven women today is going to end up with one cancer or
another," Denise Soto pointed out, and many of those cases will be breast cancer. In view of that
statistic, "how many of my students will have that in their lifetime, or their mother or
sister?"
Plenty of the academy’s 600 graduates, as she knows too well.
"I’ve been cutting wigs and we’ve been doing free treatments for cancer patients for 20 years."
Early detection is something she is now passionate about.
The Salon Professional Academy is located at 116 W. South Boundary. For more information about the
awareness event call Charlie Soto at (419) 873-9999, ext. 2.
