Memories fuel a mother’s campaign against cancer
Published 8:00 pm Monday, February 26, 2007
Cindy Lovel runs because her daughter can’t.
Four-year-old Christen Gallup died in 1985 of Burkitt’s lymphoma, a then-rare type of cancer with a miniscule survival rate.
Her mother now has a driving goal.
“I want,” she said, “to make it so that no parent has to hear their child ask if they’re going to die.”
That objective propelled Lovel to help form the first-ever Relay for Life on Bainbridge Island, a two-day cancer benefit event held last summer at the Bainbridge High School track.
With this year’s relay set for July, event organizers want to shift into high gear now with a community kick-off meeting from 4-5 p.m. Sunday at the Bainbridge Commons.
Organizers will announce the event theme, brainstorm fund-raising ideas, recruit new relay teams and solicit sponsors.
“The kick-off is a community pep rally, a celebration,” said Mary Clipsham, committee co-chair.
At last year’s relay, volunteers lined the inner track with luminarias – paper bags filled with sand and lit with candles to inspire participants during the dark hours.
Cindy Lovel plans to place Christen’s picture on one of them, as she did last year.
Christen Lovel’s cancer presented itself as a stomach ache on the morning of Dec. 24, 1984. By 7 p.m. she was in surgery at Children’s Hospital in Seattle, for removal of what doctors believed to be an enlarged lymph node.
Doctors thought she’d be home in a week, but three days later her pathology report revealed Burkitt’s.
In the months following, a pregnant Lovel practically lived in the car as she shuttled her daughter back and forth to different facilities for chemotherapy and radiation treatment.
“If there was a hell,” she said, “I was in it.”
With her husband frequently away for his work as a tugboat captain, Lovel’s brother quit his job to move in with the family and take care of her son Chad, then age 6.
The marriage didn’t survive. Stress and lack of sleep sent Lovel into premature labor; baby Travis arrived six weeks early and spent the start of his life in intensive care.
Few could imagine having two kids in the same hospital, but Lovel views it as a kind of gift.
“I have pictures of Travis sleeping in Christen’s bed,” she said. “And she fed him his bottle. It was a positive in a negative situation.”
Christen died on April 28, 1985, four months after her diagnosis.
Two weeks earlier, she had asked her mother whether she was going to die. Lovel had no choice but to tell her yes.
Lovel sought counseling and found comfort in the stories of other surviving parents. She convinced herself that she could survive too, and find purpose in her experience.
She came to view physical health with a new kind of reverence.
Three years after her daughter’s death, Lovel began her work as a personal trainer, with a mission to get people healthy and help them stay that way.
She also began to take note of cosmic coincidences. Shortly after moving to Bainbridge 10 years ago, Lovel met a neighbor who turned out to be an oncologist.
“Oh, what’s your specialty?” she asked.
He answered, “Burkitt’s lymphoma.”
The oncologist, as it happened, played a large role in putting together the current Burkitt’s treatment protocol, which was nonexistent when Christen suffered through the disease.
In 1985 doctors gave Christen a 5 percent chance of survival, which Lovel suspects they only said to make her feel better. Today, the disease has a 70 to 80 percent survival rate, by some estimates.
“Research allowed them to figure out what kind of protocol to use, and now the cure rate is higher,” Lovell said. “It’s pretty cool.”
Still, she said, there’s a long way to go in research and treatment, and what she really wants is for Burkitt’s to no longer exist.
That’s why she runs, and commits herself to community fund-raising efforts like the Relay for Life.
Last year’s relay brought out a surge of community support that took organizers by surprise.
“We were so pleased with how it went,” Clipsham said. “We got a lot of positive feedback about how much fun people had.”
Typically, first year Relay for Life events bring in between $10,000 and $15,000, said Karin Emery, the Bainbridge Relay committee’s staff partner at the American Cancer Society. Bainbridge raised almost $40,000.
“I was amazed at the island’s response to this event,” Emery said.
This year, Clipsham and co-chair Terri Segadelli set a fund-raising goal of at least $80,000, all of which will go to the American Cancer Society for research, education, advocacy and services.
“Everybody needs to help here,” Lovel said. “It’s a world effort. Everyone gets cancer, everywhere.”
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The 2007 Bainbridge Relay for Life kick-off runs 4-5 p.m. Feb. 25 at the Bainbridge Commons. Contact Mary Clipsham at 780-0714 or Terri Segadelli at 223-0303 for information on this year’s relay, slated for July 28-29 at the BHS track.
