In 2004, Tufts sophomore Sam Johnson was diagnosed with acute lymphoblastic leukemia. He underwent chemotherapy until May 2007 and fortunately survived, but he still has to undergo monthly blood tests and endure the unsure life of a cancer survivor.
Cancer is ubiquitous in modern society. An estimated 12 million people worldwide are diagnosed with cancer each year; approximately 7.6 million of these cases lead to death.
"Cancer is so widespread that I doubt that anyone hasn't had cancer impact their family or their friends," Johnson said. "Everyone needs to do their part and help to find a cure."
It is with this spirit that Tufts students gather each year to participate in Relay for Life, an annual fundraiser in which high school and college student participants, as well as other participants from all walks of life, accumulate sponsorship and spend 12 hours walking and running around a track to help promote cancer research and raise money for cancer prevention and treatment. This year, the event will take place on the Hill from March 27 to March 28.
"We don't raise -- in terms of the grand scheme of things -- that much [money] at Tufts for cancer research," freshman Meredith Dworkin, a Relay committee member, said of the program. "But I think it's also about getting people aware ... There aren't that many people who we go to school with who are fighting cancer [or] who are survivors. As much as the money aspect, it's important to get people thinking about what happens outside Tufts."
Johnson -- who has been participating in Relay for Life since his junior year in high school -- also feels that the event is as much about the symbolism of cancer awareness as it is about raising funds.
"We're up [all night] because the cancer never sleeps, so we don't sleep either," Johnson said. "I think the meaning of the night [of Relay for Life] definitely resonates with me ... It's not just walking around the track all night, there's a deeper meaning."
Relay for Life has existed since the mid-1980s when Tacoma-based surgeon Dr. Gordy Klatt decided to take it upon himself to raise extra money for cancer research by running and walking around a track for 24 hours. That night, nearly 300 friends and family members helped him to raise $27,000 for cancer research and began the Relay for Life legacy that exists today. The program has grown immensely from its humble roots, as millions now participate in it each year to raise money and awareness. Relay for Life is now approaching its seventh year at Tufts.
One of the fundraiser's prime objectives is to give researchers the resources to find new cures and treatments for cancer. When Dworkin's mother and aunt were diagnosed with cancer, alternative treatments and research helped them prevail over the illness.
"When I was in the fourth grade, my mom was diagnosed with breast cancer and at the same time my aunt was diagnosed with breast cancer," she said. "Luckily both of them went through treatments and were fine, but a lot of it was because they did alternative therapy and treatments and those wouldn't have been discovered without a lot of [modern] cancer research ... so I definitely wanted to get involved with it."
While students decide to participate in Relay for Life for a number of reasons, some, like Dworkin, are driven by their own experiences.
Johnson, for instance, has also had friends and family members who have had to, and are still, fighting cancer.
"I started relaying because my uncle ... has been having a long fight with non-Hodgkin's lymphoma, and my best friend Andy was diagnosed in middle school with Hodgkin's lymphoma," he said. "I've just had a lot of people diagnosed with cancer around me."
Similarly, senior Zach Parris' experiences play a huge role in his Relay for Life involvement.
"My personal motivation comes from the fact that my mom had cancer," Parris, who is co-chair of the Relay for Life Committee at Tufts, said. "She was first diagnosed when I was in eighth grade ... It was caught relatively early so she went through chemotherapy, went through radiation treatment, did essentially everything that she was supposed to do and came out of it on the other end pretty positively."
"The treatment is pretty gruesome," Parris continued. "You're essentially poisoning your body with the assumption that everything else in your body can hold out longer than the cancer cells can ... but by the time she finished this pretty harsh regiment of treatment, they told her there was a 95 percent chance that she would never see cancer again."
But for Parris's mother, 95 percent was not enough. During one of her routine follow-up appointments, doctors found that cancer had developed in her kidneys.
"She spent a lot of time thinking about what she wanted to do; you know, the treatment is pretty brutal; she took a little bit of time, and even in that short amount of time, the cancer spread, so it was clear that it was moving really, really quickly, so she would have had to go through an even harsher regiment of treatment," he said. "The only sure thing was that the next couple months of her life would be pretty miserable; she would pretty much have to live in the hospital if she chose this route, and with the cancer having spread to her brain, to her eyes and her lymph nodes, she decided that she had lived a happy enough life, that she had left a good enough legacy and that she didn't want to spend the last several months of her life really weakened and sick and in a really bad place because of the treatment. So when I was a freshman in high school, on Dec. 2, my mom passed away."
In the midst of tragedy, Parris has devoted himself to finding ways to prevent cancer from affecting the lives of others the way it has affected his.
"My real hope is that I relay so that no one else will have to ... come to college like I did having lost a parent from cancer and be so motivated like I was to go do Relay for Life," he said. "If I do this hard enough, if I work enough at it, I can really and truly prevent that -- by beating cancer and by really finding a cure and working to make sure that that cure is distributed to the people who need it."
He has continued this pledge and has helped the Relay for Life Committee grow from a group of three students his sophomore year to its current staff of 37.
"I felt like my mom's passing was something, obviously, that I couldn't do anything about and nothing I did would ever change that; she was gone and it was just that simple. But if I do anything and everything that I can do to help out and make sure that no one else [has] to go through what I had to go through, that would be a really meaningful contribution," Parris said. "I'm not very talented with science, so I wasn't going to be a doctor and I couldn't do research; I don't really have that many other skills to be honest, but what I can do is just commit [and] make a very real, very deep personal commitment to Relay for Life."
"Every time I really stop and think about it, I always think of it as, this is my contribution, this is what I'm able to do," he continued. "I can't do much else, but hopefully it'll be enough to make a difference."
