Blood Cancer Fundraiser Effort Kicks Off
By Matthew E. Milliken, The Herald-Sun, Durham, N.C.
Jul. 10–DURHAM — A fundraising effort that targets blood cancer will kick off its 2008 program today.
While the Leukemia and Lymphoma Society’s Light the Night Walk won’t take place until Sept. 18, a “kickoff celebration” will be held at 5:30 p.m. today in Bay 7 of the American Tobacco Campus. Both events are open to experienced fundraising team captains and walkers as well as people who want to get involved for the first time.
The society is marking the 10th anniversary of Light the Night; the event logo says “A Decade of Difference,” although the first North Carolina walk took place in Raleigh nine years ago. The organization staged walks in the Research Triangle Park for about six years before moving to downtown Durham in 2007.
The walk will stretch from American Tobacco to Central Park and back. The twilight parade will feature illuminated balloons — white for survivors, red for supporters and gold to honor victims who succumbed.
“Just people seeing that really raises awareness about the mission and about these diseases and the need to fund more research to find the cure,” said Emily Edmunds, Light the Night campaign coordinator for eastern North Carolina.
Last September’s Durham walk raised just shy of $100,000; this year’s goal is $117,000. The Leukemia and Lymphoma Society uses the money to fund research, advocacy and programs to help sufferers and relatives of sufferers of blood cancers.
More than 823,000 people in North America have leukemia, lymphoma or other blood cancers. Some 3,240 North Carolinians are expected to be diagnosed with one of the diseases this year.
Blood cancer survival rates — the percentage of people who live five years after being diagnosed — vary with the type of illness. The most common type of childhood leukemia, acute lymphoblastic leukemia or ALL, is now survived by 86 percent of stricken people, but myeloma kills about two-thirds of patients, Edmunds said.
When the Leukemia and Lymphoma Society was founded in 1949, the ALL survival rate was 4 percent. The organization believes that its investment of more than $550 million in research, including $7.1 million in ongoing projects at Duke University and UNC Chapel Hill, has extended lives.
Fifteen-year-old Nicholas Marriam of Clayton was living in Maryland when breathing trouble sent him to an emergency room around midnight on his sixth birthday. A CAT scan showed a tumor so large that it had flattened a lung and pushed his heart toward his left armpit.
Today he still suffers aftereffects from the disease and treatment, including memory loss, although follow-up tests at Duke show that he remains cancer-free.
With help from the Eastern North Carolina Leukemia and Lymphoma Society and others, Marriam founded a nonprofit organization, the Nickelby Society. It delivers gift bags to children at hospitals at Duke, UNC Chapel Hill and elsewhere, including Raleigh and Washington, D.C.
Marriam has participated in Light the Night walks in Durham and RTP and is planning to do so again this year. He likes the event because it conveys “something that every cancer survivor or someone who’s going through cancer really needs — it’s providing hope.”
Said Marriam: “The ultimate goal is to find a cure for cancer and they’re doing terrific work.”
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The Triangle’s 2008 Light the Night Walk kickoff celebration will begin at 5:30 p.m. today in Bay 7 of the American Tobacco Campus in downtown Durham. Call 677-3993 for more information.
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Copyright (c) 2008, The Herald-Sun, Durham, N.C.
Distributed by McClatchy-Tribune Information Services.
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