WFF employee Phyllis Bolden walked from the hospital to get to work last week.

She was visiting her friend with cancer. Bolden walks everywhere she needs to go, even though she has a car, and on Oct. 11 she’ll be able to help fund breast cancer research with the miles she’ll be walking.

Sponsors have given over $500 for Bolden to walk the 2008 Making Strides Against Breast Cancer walk, she said.

“I ask people to give what they think they want to give,” she said. “You have a dollar? That’s fine.”

Bolden’s friend isn’t the only significant person in her life who’s suffered with cancer. Her husband, stepmother and several other close friends died from cancer.

“First I thought, ‘I’ll do it for my friends,'” she said. “Then I thought, ‘I’ll do it for everybody. All those people who had cancer, who died, I’ll do it for them.'”

The 5-mile walk along Lakeshore Drive begins at 8:30 a.m. Bolden said it won’t be any problem for her because walking has been a huge part of her life for years.

She walks the 46 blocks from her house to Loyola every day and makes time to walk in Audubon Park as well, sometimes as many as four times around the park.

“I started walking in 1990. I was going to get married, and I was a little heavy, and I wanted to look nice in my dress,” she said.

She loved walking down the aisle feeling confident about her body and hasn’t stopped walking since.

However, in 2001, Bolden suffered a stroke and brain aneurysm.

“I had to go to therapy, and I was in the hospital for three and a half months. Then after I got out, I had to go to speech therapy to learn how to speak again. But I was determined that I wanted to go back to doing what I was doing before,” she said.

At this time, she was a blackjack dealer in a casino, and her doctor told her that she couldn’t return to that “because I wouldn’t know what two and two was.”

“But I made him a liar,” she said.

Bolden returned to blackjack dealing, then came to Loyola in 2006. She usually works in the basement of the Danna Center.

“It’s a privilege for me to do this walk,” she said. “I’m always trying to do something for someone whether or not they can do something for me. It just makes me feel good to be able to do this.”

Katie Urbaszewski can be reached at [email protected].