LEWISTON — The carefree run Carol Carpentier once planned for this weekend — during the Dempsey Challenge’s walk/run on Saturday — vanished when the doctors gave her the news.

“It’s a little bit surreal,” said the 54-year-old mother from Lewiston. “It really is.”

In early July, months after she registered for the challenge, she was diagnosed with breast cancer.

Since then, she has endured surgery to remove a cancerous lump. And the place she hoped merely to help, The Patrick Dempsey Center for Cancer Hope & Healing, has helped her instead.

“They called me,” Carpentier said. “They offered me a free massage.” She has also used the center’s growing library.

It offers her a respite from the frightening disease.

On Tuesday, she spent about 90 minutes helping pack bags of freebies that will be given to participants in the challenge.

And on Saturday — five days before her first round of chemotherapy — she plans to join the hundreds who will walk in the challenge. Her daughter, Mallory, 24, plans to be at her side.

How will she feel at the challenge, surrounded by people raising money for the center’s work?

“It’s like a support group that you didn’t know you had,” Carpentier said.

Many people in the crowd will be running and walking in memory of family members. Some will participate to help people they don’t know.

And a few, like Carpentier, are facing cancer even as they step into their walking shoes or pull on a biking jersey.

Amanda Jordan of Mechanic Falls plans to walk in support of her fiance, Jeff Mcbean. He was diagnosed last year with leukemia.

In August, Mcbean underwent a transplant in Florida.

On Saturday, Jordan plans to walk with her team, “Jeffrey’s Angels.”

She has also been working for months on a 148-page cookbook, titled “Treasures of Hope.” The hardcover volume is being sold for $15 each on the cookbooks4sale website.

She has sold about 100 copies, so far. Its recipes, including a popular one for pumpkin whoopie pies, were collected from Jordan’s kitchen and her family and friends.

“The cookbook is dedicated to my fiance and my grandparents,” she said. “I have four grandparents who dealt with cancer.”

And despite the transplant, Mcbean’s cancer remains.

“It didn’t go into remission like we hoped,” she said.

Carpentier’s cancer treatment will go for months after Saturday’s work. She is due to endure three rounds of chemotherapy. Radiation treatments will follow.

She has visited the room where she’ll receive the chemotherapy and planned to attend a class about her therapy on Friday.

“The Bennett Breast Care Center (at Central Maine Medical Center) is incredible,” she said.

Meanwhile, Carpentier plans to return to the Dempsey center, begun by actor and Maine native Patrick Dempsey. His sister, Mary, serves as the center’s volunteer corps manager.

“Mary and (massage therapist) Denise Morin are guardian angels,” Carpentier said.

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