ABOUT THE COLUMNIST
Gracie Bonds Staples is an award-winning journalist who has been writing for daily newspapers since 1979, when she graduated from the University of Southern Mississippi. She joined The Atlanta Journal-Constitution in 2000 after stints at the Fort Worth Star-Telegram, the Sacramento Bee, Raleigh Times and two Mississippi dailies. Staples was recently promoted to Senior Features Enterprise Writer. Look for her columns Thursdays and Saturdays in Living and alternating Sundays in Metro.
Twenty years and $100 million. That’s one way to sum up the relationship between Children’s Healthcare of Atlanta and Aflac.
As anniversaries go, that’s reason enough to celebrate. Bring on the bells and whistles. For the dedication. For the thousands of lives that have been saved since the partnership was born in 1995.
"We have taken the cure rate in childhood cancer from 25 percent in the 1960s to 80 percent," said Dr. William G. Woods, director of pediatric hematology and oncology. "We now have one of the largest, most well-funded childhood cancer research programs in the U.S. And the Aflac Cancer and Blood Disorders Center was recently ranked ninth in the U.S. for exceptional care by U.S. News and World Report."
Early last month, on National Cancer Survivors Day, Children's created www.choa.org/aflac20 to note the major milestones that have come from its relationship with Columbus-based insurance company Aflac.
But numbers have never told the whole story and they certainly don’t now. Survivors do.
Ansley Riedel, 27, of Atlanta is one of them.
She was just 10 months old when doctors diagnosed her with AML, one of the rarer types of leukemia. Childhood leukemia (ALL) accounts for about 30 percent of all cancers in children. At first, doctors believed Ansley might be suffering from pneumonia. She was fussy and had a low-grade fever and decreased appetite.
When she didn’t get any better, her mother, Vicki Riedel, sought a second opinion. That’s when she discovered Ansley’s spleen was enlarged and she had a “super fast” heart rate.
Doctors referred her to CHOA’s Egleston campus. It was September 1988.
“That’s when the world turned upside down,” Vicki Riedel said. “We knew that night she had leukemia. She started treatment the next day.”
Doctors gave Ansley a bone marrow transplant using her own marrow. It looked like it might work, but the cancer came back pretty quickly. For the next 18 months, Ansley would undergo an aggressive regimen of chemotherapy.
Children’s became her playground; its nurses were her caring playmates.
Ansley was a trouper. She was getting better but Vicki Riedel was scared, haunted by what ifs. What if she lost her baby girl? She and her husband began contemplating having a second child.
“I needed a reason to get out of bed,” she said.
The couple got pregnant almost immediately. Just months after Ansley finished chemo treatment in November 1990, their son Joseph was born.
Four weeks later, Ansley had another relapse. This time, doctors predicted she had a 5 percent chance of survival.
“Joseph became our hero,” Vicki Riedel said.
His marrow matched Ansley’s completely, and on July 3, 1991, doctors performed a sibling-to-sibling transplant.
For years after her transplant, Ansley would return for checkups at CHOA, where she became enamored with the staff nurses. One in particular, Nurse Ann, became her buddy. Ansley was the flower girl in her wedding. Nurse Ann was always on Ansley’s birthday party guest list.
In the spring of 1995, Vicki Riedel, who’d left her fundraising job at the Atlanta Symphony to work at CHOA, made a call to Aflac’s director of corporate communications, Kathelen Spencer Amos.
Would you consider making a gift of $25,000 to the hospital’s cancer center? In return, the hospital will name a room on its cancer floor for Aflac.
Amos jumped right over that and donated $3 million.
She knew there were critically ill children in Columbus, where Aflac is based, who had to travel to CHOA for care.
“The need for pediatric cancer care resonated with us,” she said. “We felt it would be a worthwhile thing to do.”
But even Amos hadn’t counted on how the donation would transform the corporate culture and embolden Aflac’s sales force.
“What has been extraordinary is the extent at which our commission sales people have taken this on as a cause,” she said. “They are giving about half a million dollars a month. I think that’s unprecedented in any kind of corporate setting.”
Amos said that despite never meeting the children or their families, raising money on their behalf has become a source of pride for Aflac employees, but more than that, it's a source of joy and meaning. The 15th annual News 95.5 and AM 750 WSB Care-a-Thon (choa.org/wsb) benefiting the Aflac Cancer and Blood Disorders Center of Children's Healthcare of Atlanta kicks off July 20.
“It has become part of our identity and makes people feel they are a part of something larger,” she said.
That’s because they are. The Aflac employees’ donations make it possible for doctors to give children hope and a future.
Two years ago, after getting her nursing degree from Emory University, Ansley returned to Children’s. This time as Nurse Ansley.
“Life is good,” she said.
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