To all my friends:

On Thursday, October 2, I will be walking in The Leukemia & Lymphoma Society’s Light The Night Walk to raise funds to help find a cure for blood cancers. LLS is the world’s largest voluntary health organization dedicated to funding blood cancer research, education, and patient services.

I would like to enlist your support for this important cause. It is important because there are more than 823,000 people in the United States who are fighting blood cancers—leukemia, Hodgkin and non-Hodgkin lymphoma, and myeloma—and although research is responsible for increasing survival rates for these diseases, the battle is far from over.

• Every five minutes, someone in this country is diagnosed with blood cancer.
• Every ten minutes, someone dies from one of these diseases.
• Leukemia is the leading cause of disease-related death among young adults under age 20.
• Lymphomas are the most common blood cancers and incidence increases with age.
• The myeloma survival rate is only 30 percent. Incidence is twice as high for African Americans as for all other races.

Please sponsor me. By doing so, we will all be helping to save lives. To make a donation, click here to visit my fundraising page. In addition to your valuable sponsorship, I encourage you to join me in the Light The Night walk at Volunteer Landing! (Contact me or leave a comment if you’re interested in walking with me at Volunteer Landing in Knoxville!)

Please help me to reach my goal of raising at least $100 for Light The Night. What can $100 do?

$100 allows 4 patients to make a First Connection with a trained peer counselor. 

…the First Connection program brings patients and their caregivers the opportunity to share experiences with someone who has “been through it,” and obtain valuable information on Society and community resources available to support them. This unique match gives the new patient or caregiver valuable insight from someone who also has experienced a blood cancer. Patient and volunteers are matched by age, diagnosis and gender when possible. 

Peers are trained in basic counseling skills and are armed with local resource materials so that patients and their caregivers need not feel isolated as they begin the process of treatment. (http://www.leukemia-lymphoma.org/all_page.adp?item_id=4582)

Light The Night is celebrating it’s 10th year of walks. The state of Tennessee is hosting three walks, and the Tennessee chapter of the LLS is hoping to raise more than $439,000.

Make a difference in someone’s life. Help Light The Night!