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Women & Cancer,
Summer, 2007
Roxanne Donovan does not hesitate when
asked to describe her sister-in-law and closest friend,
Joan Scarangello McNeive: “Joan was absolutely
magnificent. She was passionately alive and present.
She walked through the world with her shoulders back
and her head held high. She reveled in the lives of
her wide circle of family and friends.”
Joan was a runner, a lifelong New Yorker,
a senior news writer at NBC, and a nonsmoker when she
was diagnosed with Stage IV lung cancer in October 2001.
She was 47 years old.
Roxanne laughs when she says, in further
describing Joan, “Hallmark stock must have dipped
the first year Joan wasn’t buying Mother’s
Day cards. She spent more on Mother’s Day cards
than anyone I know. Though she wasn’t a mother
herself, she sent cards to every mother she knew in
her life—to friends and relatives and anyone who
had ever been like a mother to her. That’s the
kind of person she was.
“And she was extremely healthy.
She was one of those people that you hate because they
actually would choose the piece of fruit over the chocolate
cake for dessert. She was tall and lean and always ate
carefully.”
That’s why, despite the fact that
she had a family history of lung cancer—her mother
had died of the disease 20 years earlier—and despite
knowing what signs to look for, Joan’s diagnosis
still came as a surprise. She had gone to the doctor
with a persistent cough and, when the chest X-ray was
clear, she was prescribed antibiotics. When the cough
hadn’t cleared six months later, her doctor ordered
a CT scan, and that’s when she was diagnosed with
lung cancer.
At the time of Joan’s diagnosis,
she and her family were frustrated by the apparent vacuum
of research that existed for lung cancer. It seemed
that there had been no progress made in the 20 years
since Joan’s mother had battled the disease. Roxanne
says, “When Joan’s mother was diagnosed
and there were so few options for treatment and so little
research being done, we thought, this must be a fluke.
There will be progress soon. And then, when Joan was
diagnosed and there was still no new research, no progress,
we couldn’t believe it.”
Joan tried every available option as
she researched her treatment, looking in every direction
for some novel approach or emerging research, and in
every direction she met a dead end.
Roxanne remembers that during this time,
as she continued to research treatment options, her
sister-in-law continued to live fully in each day she
was granted. “She was incredibly happy. She quit
her job and worked on her novel. She got married and
threw a huge wedding. She was full of life. A week before
she died, she threw a birthday party for her husband.”
After Joan died, nine months after her
diagnosis, her friends and family knew that they had
to do something to make a difference—to fill the
void in research and treatment options and to raise
awareness about the disease. This committed group established
the Joan Scarangello Foundation to Conquer Lung Cancer,
or Joan’s Legacy. Their mission: funding innovative
research and increasing awareness of the world’s
leading cancer killer, with an emphasis on nonsmoking-related
lung cancer.
Joan’s Legacy has been largely
funded by an annual fundraiser: the Strolling Supper
with News and Blues, which this year attracted more
than 500 attendees to New York City’s Times Square
Studios (home of ABC’s Good Morning America) and
raised more than $840,000 for lung cancer research.
Susan Mantel, executive director of
Joan’s Legacy, describes the organizations current
fundraising strategy as increasingly collaborative.
“In a challenge this big, the most efficient,
effective way to make an impact is to work together.
And increasingly [we] have been approached by other
groups who have faced a similar loss and believe in
the strength of our approach to funding the best researchers
out there.”
In the three years that the foundation
has been awarding grants, it has distributed $1.3 million
dollars in research funding that focuses primarily on
novel approaches to the treatment of lung cancer. Of
that 1.3 million, $100,000 was due to the type of partnerships
that Mantel describes—the co-funding came from
the likeminded Thomas G. Labrecque Foundation, and the
LUNGevity Foundation. And this year commitments have
already been made by Thomas G. Labrecque Foundation
and the Felice Lipit Jentis Memorial BAC research Trust.
“I believe that it is really
only by putting all of our voices together,” Mantel
says, “that the full power of the lung cancer
community will be felt.”
In addition to funding research, Joan’s
Legacy is committed to raising awareness about lung
cancer, and to that end it has created an annual Joanie
Award, presented each November, to honor Joan’s
memory as a journalist and to recognize “exceptional
journalism about lung cancer, women and the disease,
and/or about non-smokers and lung cancer.”
Joan’s Legacy is also devoted
to fighting the stigma attached to lung cancer. Roxanne
recounts how hurtful it was for Joan to encounter the
response she would often face after her diagnosis when
“I’m so sorry” wasn’t always
the first thing she would hear:
“The first response would be,
‘How much did you smoke,’ or ‘When
did you quit smoking.’ Never ‘I’m
so sorry.’ The indignity, the hurtfulness of that
response to the diagnosis is terrible. Nobody should
need to feel ashamed of the disease. Nobody deserves
lung cancer.”
In response to Joan’s experience—and
to that of many other lung cancer patients, smokers
and non-smokers who have dealt with the stigma attached
to the disease— the foundation felt it important
to instill, as one of its core values, the principle
that all patients with lung cancer deserve compassion
and support, regardless of smoking status, and to operate
from that place of compassion in all the work that it
does.
Indeed, it is compassion and commitment
that come through when Roxanne speaks about the foundation’s
work as it continues to honor Joan’s memory by
raising funds and awareness. When she speaks about her
sister-in-law and best friend there is such obvious
devotion and love present; and when she describes her
continued commitment to finding a cure for lung cancer,
the same passion is evident.
Roxanne admits that her work for Joan’s
Legacy is, of course, extremely personal, “I have
children and I don’t want to be facing the same
dearth of information in another twenty years with the
next generation of Scarangellos. And I am of course
working in honor of Joan’s memory. We couldn’t
do anything for Joan when she was alive, and with this
work I know that we’re making a difference.”
On a larger scale, Roxanne views the
organization’s goal as much more far-reaching:
find a cure for all those in Joan’s position.
“My inspiration, my goal, is to cure it and get
out. I’m not interested in glossy newsletters.
It’s all about the research.”
When asked what Joan’s Legacy
can offer women diagnosed with lung cancer and their
caregivers if they are facing a diagnosis today, Roxanne
responds, “I would want them to know that progress
is being made every minute, that someone is doing something,
that we are working toward something, and that new answers
are coming. I would want them to know that they are
not facing the same dead end that we were facing when
Joan was diagnosed.”
Ultimately, beyond the very considerable
results that the foundation is generating through research
and awareness campaigns, Joan’s Legacy has created
something perhaps even more important: A legacy of hope
for lung cancer patients and those love them.
For more information about Joan’s
Legacy, visit www.joanslegacy.org or call (212) 627-5500.
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