Roast beef dinner features fun, food

by Alice E. Gerard
Grand Island Dispatch, April 25, 2008

Alicia Sommer and Dan McBride of The Record Breakers Featuring
the Polka Dot Chix flank Relay For Life chair Mary Dunbar-Daluisio.

It’s a bird, it’s a plane… it’s a human sized hot dog?

Yes, that’s right. A human-sized hot dog will be present at the roast beef dinner from 2 to 7 p.m. April 26 at the Knights of Columbus Hall, 1841 Whitehaven Road.

The roast beef dinner is a fundraiser being put together by The Record Breakers Featuring the Polka Dot Chix, one of 49 teams that will participate in the June 6 Relay For Life, to be held on the Grand Island High School track, to raise funds for the American Cancer Society. Tickets for the roast beef dinner are $6.

According to team co-captain Alicia Sommer, “We’re doing the roast beef dinner and the basket raffle and the 50-50 split and the silent auction. For the silent auction, we have two beautiful paintings that are made in purple for our relay, and we have some autographed Sabres items and some Buffalo Bills items as well.”

Dan McBride, also team co-captain, said, “Coca-Cola donated the soft drinks. The Island Deli is our sponsor. They’re donating the roast beef. We’re, hopefully, going to have face painting, a fish game, an egg game, and a whole bunch of fun stuff.”

“It will be fun for all ages, kids and adults,” Sommer said.

It is serious fun, both McBride and Sommer said. The decorations at each table have been designed to remind people of the toll that cancer continues to take in the community. “Every cancer has a specific color. Leukemia, for example, has orange. Dan has a green wristband for lymphoma. We’re going to have each table decorated with a different color for that different cancer. The table will have a list of names of people we know who are affected by that specific cancer,” Sommer said.

McBride and Sommer spent some time writing a list of names of individuals who have been diagnosed with cancer. “Without even thinking too hard, we filled a whole page,” Sommer said.

Both Sommer’s and McBride’s names are on that list.

Shortly after Sommer celebrated her first birthday, her parents, Becky Sommer-Stufkosky and Kevin Sommer, were informed that their daughter had stage three neuroblastoma. The disease affected her kidney and wrapped itself around her aorta, Sommer said. As a baby, Sommer received a very strong chemotherapy. She said that “The dosages they were giving me were too high, even for a normal full-grown male.” In addition, Sommer’s kidney was removed.

“After a little more than a year and four different types of chemotherapy, I went into remission, and I went on to have just checkups,” Sommer, who is now 18, said. She added that she has been in remission ever since.

McBride was diagnosed with stage four mantle cell lymphoma in 2006. Shortly before the October surprise storm, McBride had a bone marrow transplant at Roswell Park Cancer Institute. “Ninety five percent of my bone marrow was cancer. I had the record at Roswell of the highest white blood cell count recorded there at over 600,000. In a normal, healthy person, the count is between 4,000 and 11,000.”

Both Sommer and McBride said that surviving cancer takes a positive attitude and the support of family and friends.

“It always helped me to have somebody there who can listen to the doctor, to take it in,” McBride said. “There’s so much going through your mind that you don’t hear everything the doctor says and you don’t remember everything they say. There’s so much going through your mind. Just the term cancer is shocking. No one wants to hear the word cancer. The support group of someone going through cancer is just as important as the person fighting it.”

McBride said that the medical care that he received in Roswell Park was another factor in his survival. “I have to give a lot of credit to the doctors at Roswell because they were aggressive fighting it and they said that I was young and would be able to handle the aggressive form of chemo that they were giving me, and my doctor said that he would always stay a step ahead of the cancer. If it was going to battle me, he was going to battle even harder against it. Look at me now. I’m here.”

“I’m glad that Roswell is so close. They are amazing there. The nurses and doctors are like family to me,” McBride said.

Sommer added, “It’s your big family.”

McBride said that his children, Rachel, 19, and Nicholas, 20, were his motivation to keep going when things became difficult. “My cousin told me one day, ‘You wouldn’t sacrifice two years of your life to live 34 more years? To see the kids graduate and get married and have grandkids and everything else?’ That struck a chord in me.”

Sommer said, “When I was going through it, I obviously did not know what was wrong with me. I used the hospital as my playground. And my mom said that seeing me all happy and running around and pulling out my IV was inspiration to her.”

Sommer, who lost several of her friends to cancer, said that she is hoping to have a career as a pediatric oncologist. “When I was back in elementary school, I knew that I wanted to be some kind of doctor. At first, it was a dentist. In fourth or fifth grade, I had lost two of my friends to cancer. I wanted to help kids who were like this. I didn’t want to lose any more friends.”

Mary Dunbar-Daluisio, co-chair of the Relay For Life, added, “We’re so tired of seeing the pain and suffering of this disease and having it brought to us. I think that is what inspires us to fight as hard as we do.”

“On the positive end, the survivor rate is increasing. It is on the incline for the third year in a row. We’re headed in the right direction. As they say, if you see the finish line, you want to sprint there; you don’t want to slow down. I think that’s why we pull up our boot straps and come together,” Dunbar-Daluisio said.