DENVER, CO--(Marketwire - May 6, 2011) - As Mother's Day approaches, Guadalupe (Pep) Torres, executive director of the Colorado Ovarian Cancer Alliance (COCA), is reminded once again of the reason she joined the fight against ovarian cancer, a sly, deadly disease that often avoids diagnosis until it reaches an advanced stage.
Torres' mother, Connie, succumbed to the disease in 1986. "It is so hard to watch your mother suffer. She's at the essence of why I work with COCA," Torres says. "At the time, we had no clue to what ovarian cancer was and, unfortunately, many families today are in that same position."
Ovarian cancer kills 220 Colorado women annually -- that's one death every 36 hours. According to