Salon.com > Gilda's Club

Cancer has a “game-changing” moment

Tue, 11 Dec 2012 21:02:00 +0000

On Monday morning, I sat in a waiting room at Memorial Sloan-Kettering, drinking a bottle of dye disguised as a room temperature, fruit-flavored drink. I was there, as I am on a regular basis, for my scans. As I waited for my name to be called, to be ushered into a room where I'd change into a seersucker robe, where I'd have a drip attached to my arm, and where I would hold very still while technicians took pictures of my insides, I read the paper. And there on the front page were two words that leapt out at me. Two words that changed my life: Immune cells.

It was a compelling, dramatic story, about a Pennsylvania girl named Emma Whitehead who'd had aggressive, treatment-resistant leukemia. Last spring, Whitehead's doctors performed an experimental treatment on her, removing millions of her T-cells and inserting new genes, using a "disabled form of H.I.V. because it is very good at carrying genetic material into T-cells." From there, the altered cells were returned to her body, with the hope that "if all goes well they multiply and start destroying the cancer."

What do you mean, you don’t know who Gilda Radner is?

Fri, 30 Nov 2012 19:22:00 +0000

It was sad to hear that some chapters of the Gilda's Club cancer charities have decided to drop Gilda Radner's name from their title because young people no longer know who she was. (See the Nov. 28 post by Salon columnist Mary Elizabeth Williams on the subject.) We say that not just because we love Gilda's comedy, but because we liked who she was as a person. What many people don't realize is that there were some dramatic contrasts between the Gilda Radner you saw on "Saturday Night Live" and who she was behind the scenes.

A Gilda’s Club loses Gilda

Wed, 28 Nov 2012 16:33:00 +0000

One of the mottos of Gilda's Club, the support organization for people with cancer and their friends and family, is "Come as you are." But if you're a member of the Madison, Wis., chapter, that all-encompassing message of acceptance must come with the codicil, "And who are you again?" It has recently announced that it's changing its name, because apparently people there don't know who Gilda Radner was.

Gilda's Club -- created in honor of the "Saturday Night Live" star who died in 1989 of ovarian cancer -- doesn't just take inspiration from the big-mouthed cartoon figure on its logo. It embodies Radner's open, playful spirit in a clubhouse environment where parties are a regular occurrence and junior members are called Noogies. Yet Lannia Syren Stenz, the Madison club's executive director, told the Wisconsin State Journal Tuesday that "One of the realizations we had this year is that our college students were born after Gilda Radner passed, as we are seeing younger and younger adults who are dealing with a cancer diagnosis. We want to make sure that what we are is clear to them and that there’s not a lot of confusion that would cause people not to come in our doors."