“I proudly share my journey through cancer. I’m capable of overcoming challenges, and cancer is just one of them,” Patricia Salazar shares with PEOPLE.
Three years ago, Patricia Salazar was feeling fantastic. At 31, she was a super fit athlete, about to tackle her first full Ironman race. Plus, she was happily in love with fellow athlete Aaron Toro, who would later become her husband.
“I was feeling really great,” she recalls. “I was so healthy. I was an Ironman.”
Everything changed with one phone call on October 7, 2021. Patricia was sitting in her gym’s parking lot in Los Gatos, California, when her gynecologist called her on Zoom. The results from a routine biopsy Patricia had done a few weeks earlier were in.
“She asked where I was and if there was someone I could go to,” Patricia recalls, now 34. “She said, ‘You have squamous cell carcinoma on your cervix.’ I couldn’t tell you what she said after that — it might as well have been gibberish — because all I heard was, ‘You have cancerous cells on your cervix.’ I called my mom, who was at work, and asked her to [meet me at] home right away.”
Salazar found out she had stage 2B cervical cancer. In December 2021, she had surgery to remove her uterus, cervix, fallopian tubes, and a tumor the size of a lime. She also had five weeks of radiation treatment. Looking back, she admits there were signs of cancer she missed. Nearly ten years ago, she tested positive for HPV, which can cause cervical cancer. However, her doctor said it wasn’t something to worry about. She also had occasional spotting, but she thought it was because of her intense training and competitions.
“I used to think that having irregularities as an athlete was normal,” says the California native. She also missed her regular Pap smear exams for over two years because of COVID. “I’ve learned: Always let a doctor decide what’s okay. Don’t try to figure it out on your own.”
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Now, over two years later, a cancer-free Salazar looks back on her tough journey with appreciation for the lessons she’s learned.
“I feel proud of how I dealt with cancer,” says Salazar, who lives with Toro, 29, and their dog Bryce in Saratoga Springs, Utah.
She urges women to stand up for themselves and for young people to get the HPV vaccine, which became available in 2006. It’s almost 100 percent effective in preventing cervical cancer and other related cancers. This year, about 14,000 American women will be diagnosed with cervical cancer, and over 4,000 will die from it.
“The people around 30 years old now are the ones who didn’t get the HPV vaccine,” says Dr. Christina Annunziata, from the American Cancer Society. “That’s where we’re seeing the most cancers. By the time the vaccine was approved, they were already too old for it to be most effective.”
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Salazar was born in Los Gatos, California, to Gabe, 64, who works in construction, and Kelly, 59, who owns a small business. She’s the older of two daughters and grew up in Gardnerville, Nevada, an hour south of Reno.
“It was a small rural town,” Salazar remembers. “We lived on a ranch with horses, pigs, goats, and chickens. But I always wanted to leave.”
After graduating from high school in 2007, she became a young ambassador for Rotary International in Halmstad, Sweden, living with a host family for a year. “It was amazing,” she says.
Back in California, she attended Santa Clara University, studying political science. She worked in fundraising for the university before joining the Positive Coaching Alliance in 2020, a nonprofit focused on youth sports, where she’s now the director of national advancement.
While traveling for work, she always brought along running shoes for exercise. “I just wanted to stay fit,” says Salazar, who ran her first half marathon in 2013. “I did so poorly that I thought, ‘I have to try that again and do better.'”
By 2017, she had completed three marathons and broadened her fitness routine to include swimming and biking. That year, she also took part in her first half triathlon. The next summer, in 2018, she entered her first half Ironman race, which involves a 1.2-mile swim, a 56-mile bike ride, and a 13.1-mile run. “I fell in love with it,” she says.
Three years later, during a trip to Bryce Canyon in Utah, she met Toro. While hiking a steep trail, Toro, who was on leave from the Navy and training for an Ironman competition, ran past her.
“I thought, ‘Wow, he’s so attractive!’ He looked like one of the Hemsworth brothers,” Salazar remembers. “I had nothing to lose, so I called out to him, ‘Hey, are you single?’ He turned around and said, ‘Yeah’ — and the rest is history.”
The next morning, they went jogging together in the canyons and then shared a ride to Salt Lake City. By the end of the four-hour drive, they had decided to keep seeing each other.
“We had such great conversations during that car ride,” says Salazar. “I was attracted to her right away,” adds Toro, who left for a six-month deployment to Spain in July, just three months before Salazar got her Pap smear results.
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Feeling devastated, she called Toro in Spain to share the diagnosis and the possibility that she might not be able to have children.
“I told him, ‘I love you, but if you don’t want to go through this with me, I understand,'” she remembers. “And he said, ‘I didn’t commit to you because you could give me children. I committed to you because I love you.'”
On November 15, Salazar started taking hormonal injections to stimulate her ovaries, and two weeks later doctors retrieved five viable eggs. A month later, she had a six-hour surgery to remove her cervix, uterus, and fallopian tubes.
“I was in a lot of pain, but I was eager to start living my life again,” Salazar says. She returned home to her studio apartment in Los Gatos three days later to begin her recovery.
Shortly after, on Christmas Eve, Toro proposed.
“I jumped off that couch and said, ‘Yes!'” Salazar recalls. “I hadn’t moved that fast in nine days!”
With a 30% chance of her cancer returning, in February 2022 Salazar started a five-week course of radiation treatment five times a week. The treatment caused severe diarrhea, dehydration, and nausea.
“I could barely eat,” Salazar remembers. She received three blood transfusions in the last two weeks to help regain her strength. “I was really struggling, I was so sick.”
Just a month after finishing her radiation treatment, Salazar started to feel stronger and decided to join the Sea Otter Classic, a 30-mile bike race in Monterey, California, with lots of tough hills.
“I didn’t do very well, and it took me a long time,” she says. “But while I was biking, I told myself, ‘This is who you were before cancer, and this is who you still are. You can handle tough things — and cancer is just one of them.'”
On September 2, 2022, Salazar and Toro got married in a small ceremony at Snow Canyon State Park in Utah, not far from where they first met at Bryce Canyon 14 months earlier.
“After my cancer journey, I wanted our wedding to focus on our love and what we’ve been through,” Salazar says. “We invited four friends and wrote our own vows. It was really special.”
Nowadays, the newlyweds enjoy cooking together on weekends and going hiking with their dog, Bryce. Toro recently left the Navy and now works as a tech account manager at a software company, while Salazar continues her work with nonprofit organizations.
Even though her radiation treatment has started her menopause early (she’s thinking about taking hormone replacement therapy), she and Toro hope to start a family with the help of a surrogate in the next year.
“We want to get started soon,” Salazar says. “Beating cancer was just one obstacle. I’m still the same person, I just have a longer story now.”
