When Life Handed This Young Woman Lemons, She Made Lemon Meringue Pie

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In a story that is both heart wrenching and heroic, the widow of NASCAR driver and team owner Bobby Hamilton has decided to make more than some of the proverbial lemonade from the lemon tree that life handed to her.

Her late husband, who was diagnosed with head and neck cancer back in early 2006 died January, 2007 despite intervention with radiation treatments and chemotherapy. In an interview with him in May, 2006, he seemed relatively upbeat as if they had caught the cancer in time and prevented it from going into the head and lungs.

Q: How are you feeling?

Bobby Hamilton Sr.: Well, today's been my better day. I went to St. Louis and felt like a million bucks....

Q: Bobby, what is your prognosis for returning and what is the cancer that you have?

BH Sr.: My cancer is called head and neck cancer. Cancer is a strange deal. We've learned when it starts up around the head area it travels downward toward the right side of your body. So it never made it to my head, just started in my neck. About 50% percent of head and neck cancer is that exact thing. It sort of embedded in the right side of my neck. It froze there........So, I wasn't even set up for radiation until May 30, and I'm on my second week of radiation. Almost by the time was going to start radiation, I'm going to be done.

His condition deteriorated and 8 months later, he departed our physical world.

However, this story is about his wife's amazing ability to continue to fight for her husband after such a rapidly deteriorating condition that presented itself following dental surgery.

Lori Hamilton, 33, owner and operator of Bobby Hamilton Racing has donned some new shoes to wear on the race circuit: cancer awareness for race fans. According to the article, Hamilton believes that the track is the perfect place to create awareness:

"At a racetrack, we have a captive audience of 80,000 people," Hamilton said. "If we can reach a third of them, maybe it can make a difference."

The American Cancer Society estimates this year, nearly 40,000 new cases of oral, head and neck cancer will be diagnosed in the United States - 75,000 patients will die from the disease.

Despite the statistics showing that these cancers are twice as likely to occur in men than in women with a heavy correlation being on the male population's occurrence of heavy tobacco use and drinking compared to women and this type of cancer's prevalence in those who drink and use tobacco product, Lori Hamilton was shocked when her husband was diagnosed.

Hamilton explained her husband was neither a drinker nor a smoker. "He took very good care of himself. I'm not sure why this happened. It blindsides you, It just completely caught us off guard."

Even still, new information is showing that possibly 30 percent of oral cancers are being linked to sexually transmitted diseases such as HPV (human papillomavirus) caused by unprotected sexual contact, including oral sex. HPV is also the number one cause of cervical cancer in women.

So as Lori Hamilton continues to keep Bobby Hamilton Racing running around track, she also has taken this tragedy and used it to help thousands of others to bring awareness to what could be a silent killer.

Way to go Lori. Way to keep his engine running while helping countless of others.