FOR THE NEWS-SUN
   Racehorse trainer Jamie Zamora pops out of her pickup truck and
briskly strides down the shedrow of her Zia Park barn. The horses know
her. Their heads turn toward her with attentive ears pricked.
   Zamora moves like she is on a mission, but always takes time for a
horse. She stops to pet a horse’s forehead.Drawn to the next horse, she
walks over to him and scratches his jaw with her stylish purple nails.
   Everything connected with the
Zamora stable is purple. Purple racing silks, purple clothes and purple
barn appointments. Want to find the Zamora barn at any New Mexico
racetrack? Just look for the purpleclad barn.
   Now, along with everything at Zia Park in Hobbs, it’s turning pink.
   It will be Tuff N Pink Day at Zia Park on Sunday to help raise breast
cancer awareness. The jockeys will wear pink silks, the gate crew will be
outfitted in pink and the outriders and employees will wear pink. There
will be giveaways and fans wearing pink will receive a free program.
   Funds will be raised for Susan G. Komen for the Cure, the nonprofit
organization that uses pink in its breast cancer awareness campaign.
   “It’s going to be a total pink out,” Zia Park assistant general manager
Rick Baugh said. “We’re showing everybody that racing is tough
enough to wear pink.”
   The project was the idea of breast cancer survivor Zamora and her
friend Vanessa Mikkelson.
   “We went to Rick and had a meeting,” Zamora said. “They just had one
request; when we do it, let’s make it big.”
   Breast cancer is the No. 1 cause of cancer death in Hispanic women. It is
the number-two cause of cancer death in white, African American,
Asian/Pacific Islander and Native American women, according to the
Centers For Disease Control. There are approximately 190,000 women and
men diagnosed with breast cancer every year and about 42,000 deaths
yearly.
   Zamora became a breast cancer statistic during summer 2006.
   “You have cancer,” a surgeon’s representative
told her after she had exploratory surgery. “It’s malignant;
we have to go in and get it out.”
   “When I heard that, everything got cloudy. I didn’t hear another word. I
thank God that Chris was there,” Zamora said about her husband, a
jockey.
   Two weeks later she had surgery.
   “It was a 50-cent-piece size lumpectomy and there was nothing in the
lymph nodes they took out. I was lucky,” Zamora said.
   Life got tougher. Chemotherapy and radiation started. She took a
chemotherapy pill daily for six weeks and had radiation treatments for
eight weeks.
   “I was horribly tired. A shower would wipe me out. I couldn’t believe
it. I would take a shower and need to lay down and rest,” she said. “It’s
tough to get up and go to radiation every day.
   “By the time they do surgery and you have the chemo and radiation
treatments, there is no privacy left. It’s like there is no ’personal’ anymore,”
she said.
   She trudged forward through the ordeal with a lot of motivation from
Chris. He is a strong jockey, one who uses his strength to power horses
across the finish line in close races. He drove Jamie to the end of her
ordeal in a similar style.
   “He wouldn’t let me get down,” she said.
   Zamora’s breast cancer was found in an annual mammogram.
   “That mammogram saved my life because we were able to catch the cancer
early,” she said.
   “If I can just make one person aware; if I can help one person to get
checked and it gets caught early, like mine, then it’s worth it,” she said. “I
have two sisters and I started a new family tradition with them and my
mother. She was 65 and never had a mammogram. I told them that I was
sorry that I put them in a high-risk category. Now, we are all getting
mammograms every year.”
   Now, three years after her diagnosis, surgery and follow-up treatments,
she has a mammogram every six months and visits her doctors annually.
She diligently tends to her horses, but racing has a new perspective.
   “When we lose a race, we realize that we are healthy and just say that
we’ll win a race tomorrow. Sometimes you just need to step back and realize
what’s important,” she said.
   Zamora, done with the tasks at her barn, briskly heads back to her pickup
truck to take Chris to the jockey’s room so he can prepare for the afternoon’s
Zia Park races. She moves at her quick pace, but stops to acknowledge
a horse lowering his head, asking for her attention.
   She takes a moment and takes a little polish off her nails while gently
scratching his shoulder. Then, as always, she moves forward.