August 17, 2007
WEEI-NESN Jimmy Fund Radio-Telethon continues today
Staff members do their part behind the scenes, on the air
Volunteers, including Dana-Farber president Edward J. Benz Jr., MD, (front left) take phone calls.
Bernadette Giandomenico is a Dana-Farber employee. She's also a cancer survivor. Yesterday, she was a volunteer — and a radio star.
Giandomenico was one of many Dana-Farber staff members and hundreds of others who took part Thursday in the WEEI-NESN Jimmy Fund Radio-Telethon at Fenway Park. Either by helping out behind the scenes, being interviewed live about their Institute experiences, or — as in Giandomenico's case — both, they enabled the sixth annual event to raise nearly $1 million for Dana-Farber during the first of its two days on the air.
Today, with a goal of raising $3 million overall for research and care at Dana-Farber, the radio-telethon is running from 6 a.m. to midnight. The unprecedented 26 hours of on-air coverage includes dozens of interviews with doctors, nurses, support staff, and cancer survivors like Giandomenico, as well as appeals from celebrities the likes of Tim Daly, Donnie Wahlberg, Lenny Clarke, and Jim Belushi. An online auction also ran concurrently with yesterday's broadcast, but the highlight as always was the moving accounts of cancer survivors.
"I came into work one day and wasn't feeling well," Giandomencio recalled in her interview on WEEI 850-AM Sports Radio. "When I went to Occupational Health, they told me to go over to Brigham and Women's. I walked in there, and I didn't walk out for a month. It took a bone marrow biopsy for them to know definitively it was leukemia."
Giandomencio's diagnosis came in April 2004, five months after she had started at Dana-Farber. Because she worked here, she explained, "I wasn't as terrified as I might have been. I knew that there was hope, and in the end it would just be a matter of what we had to do."
Now in remission for more than three years, Giandomencio — who works in Volunteer Services — says she was happy to help out at the radio-telethon, which in her case meant collecting pledge sheets compiled by other volunteers answering phones. Her message for listeners? "Keep giving. Twenty or 30 years ago, there was no cure for my type of leukemia [acute promyelocytic leukemia]. It only came from research. So keep giving."
Starting the process
Telling listeners where their pledges will go was the focus of another WEEI interviewee, Dana-Farber Chief of Staff Stephen E. Sallan, MD. "This money goes to doing things we otherwise couldn't do," Sallan said, "[Such as] having more nurses per patient, and more people to give the care. On the other side is the all-important research dollars. When we have new ideas and we need to test them, we use the money that comes in from all our friends giving today, and take our freshest, best ideas and start the process."
Since it started in 2002, the radio-telethon has raised more than $8.3 million for Dana-Farber, including $2.9 million last year. Among the advances during that period noted by Sallan has been the ability to use genetics to develop more targeted treatment for each patient. "Instead of just putting in difficult chemicals that kill normal cells as well as cancer cells, we now have very specific drugs," he explained. "Instead of having to have a bone marrow transplant for one kind of leukemia, you can just take a pill at bedtime."
The eventual goal, Sallan explained, is that cancer will become a chronic and very treatable disease, like diabetes. "It's not going to be scary, or painful, and most importantly, it's not going to kill you."
Today's continuation of the radio-telethon at Fenway will coincide with a doubleheader between the Boston Red Sox and the Los Angeles Angels of Anaheim at the ballpark, and Jimmy Fund-related activities will be a part of the action. Cancer survivors will be throwing out ceremonial first pitches before the afternoon game, as will DFCI "Medical All-Stars" Ann Partridge, MD, MPH (day game) and Holcombe Grier, MD (night game). In addition, Jordan Leandre, the 7-year-old Jimmy Fund Clinic patient who has moved Red Sox crowds several times with his heartfelt renditions of the National Anthem, will be back to sing again before the nightcap. Unlike some past performances, Jordan plans to walk out to the microphone himself.
— Saul Wisnia
saul_wisnia@dfci.harvard.edu
