The following quote is from a recent article in the Tacoma News Tribune:

"Leukemia might kill Wayne Mangan, but he's saving lives in the meantime.

Eight drives organized by Mangan and his friends have failed to find a bone marrow donor for him, but they have found tentative matches for six other people.

Mangan couldn't be happier.

'I might die with this disease,' he said. 'But I know darn well what we are doing will save someone.'"

We found out about Wayne Mangan earlier this week when we made our donation to Cascade Regional Blood Services (CRBS). Wayne has CML (Chronic Myelogenous Leukemia) and has not responded well to Gleevec, which is the primary treatment for this disease. At this point his best chance of survival is to find a bone marrow donor, but so far a willing match has not been found.

The Church for All Nations in Tacoma will be hosting a blood/marrow drive in Wayne's honor on Saturday, May 20th from 8:00am to 4:00pm. The Church for All Nations is located at 111-112th St. East, Tacoma, just east of 112th and Pacific Ave. If you live in the Tacoma area please come and support this event by bringing friends and family. A huge BBQ for all will be provided and they are hoping to break the National record for the largest one-day bone marrow drive.

If you don't live in the Tacoma area, visit the The National Marrow Donor Program website for information on where you can sign up for the National Marrow Donor Program (NMDP) Registry.

-- Todd

P.S. After we left CRBS on Wednesday we went to Red Robin for dinner and my wife struck up a conversation with our waitress Lori about their respective kids. Lori pulled out a photo of her daughter Nevaeh and we saw that she was bald. It turned out that Lori's daughter has ALL (acute lymphocytic leukemia) and the whole family have become good friends with Wayne! (The little girl in the photo w/ Wayne above is Nevaeh!) What are the odds that we'd decide to go to Red Robin for dinner that night and get the one waitress there whose daughter has Leukemia and who knows Wayne? My life is just a series of strange coincidences!

Cascade Regional Blood Services
Alex's Coupons featured charity this month is Cascade Regional Blood Services. CRBS is a non-profit independent community blood center serving the South Sound region of Western Washington. CRBS provides 100% of the regular blood supply and services to many South Puget Sound hospitals, clinics and trauma centers including Tacoma General Hospital. Alex's Coupons is making a donation of $1000 to this very worthy organization.

My wife Andrea and I spent the first two weeks of May trying to figure out which charity should receive our monthly donation of $1000. Initially it was going to be a national charity, but after some thought we decided to keep the donation local this month. Yesterday was a particularly hot day here (at least for Seattle!) and while I was checking the weather report on King5's website I happened to read the following story:

Tacoma blood bank vans vandalized by tire slasher

I could not believe that anyone would be heartless, stupid, moronic (fill in your adjective here!) enough to do this to a blood bank! At first I was just angry and then as I read on in the story I came to this sentence:

"The mass slashing could cut into the non-profit organization's budget. To fix all 11 tires, it could cost them about $1,000."

Can you say "My Name is Earl"! Needless to say I immediately knew that we had found our featured charity for this month. I ran it past Andrea and she thought it was a great idea too. So I contacted Kelley Gregory at CRBS today and made arrangements for us to deliver a $1000 check to them tomorrow afternoon!

Now some of you may ask what a blood bank has to do with Childhood Cancer charities. The answer is...everything! Over the course of her five years of treatment my daughter Alex had hundreds of blood transfusions, both red blood and platelets. During her first transplant she was hooked up to a platelet drip for 3 days straight. Without organizations like CRBS, the red blood and platelets that Alex desperately needed to survive would not have been available. Now while Alex never received blood directly from CRBS, (Seattle Children's is serviced by a different blood bank), my son Nick received several red blood transfusions when he was in the Tacoma General NICU (Neonatal Intensive Care Unit) and that blood came directly from CRBS.

If you live in the South Sound area of Western Washington I would encourage you to check out the CRBS website to see when and where you can donate blood. Studies have shown that while 95% of the population will need blood by age 72, only 5% of the eligible population donates blood. You can give if you are in good health, weigh at least 110 pounds and are at least are 18 (ages 16-17 may donate when they present a signed Permission for a minor to donate blood form). If you don't live in this area please contact your local blood bank to find out when and where you can donate. You can find the closest blood bank to you on the American Association of Blood Banks website.

Thanks in advance for your support. Take care.

Todd, Andrea, Alex & Nicholas Martini

Anyone who's been reading my blog lately probably noticed that most of my recent posts have been (hopefully successful) attempts at humor. I did this consciously because I knew that my next serious post was going to be a hard one for me to write.

April 29th would have been my Dad's 77th birthday. My Dad died last July at the age of 76 years old at a nursing home in New Jersey. My Dad was in really bad shape for the last few years of his life due to severe complications from diabetes. As most of you know I live on the west coast and with all the upheaval of the last seven years, I only got to see my Dad three times over that time period.

Growing up I was always very close to my Dad. In fact you could say I was definitely a "daddy's boy". My Dad was a tug boat captain in New York Harbor for almost forty years, which I thought was the coolest job in the world. When my brothers and sister were younger they rarely got to see him, as my Dad would work the morning shift as a Captain on the Erie Railroad tugs then work the afternoon shift as a Captain on the Penn Central tugs. When he was done for the day he'd come home, eat dinner and go straight to bed. Then on the weekends he would cut our neighbors lawns to make extra money.

My Dad worked so hard because he wanted to give his kids a better life than he had. My parents moved to Ridgewood, which is an affluent bedroom community outside NYC, because they knew the schools there were among the best in New Jersey. We really couldn't afford to live there, but somehow my parents made it work. Sometime in the future I'll have to write a post on how my Mom managed to feed six people each month on less money than I sometimes make in a day!

When I was six my Dad started a new job as a Captain for another tug company. The job paid a lot more money and also allowed him to have 28 weeks off each year, as he worked a week on/week off schedule. This meant that he had a lot of free time to spend with me while I was growing up. Over the next 12 years I got to spend more time with my Dad than my three siblings combined got to spend with him during their childhoods, and I consider myself very lucky to have had that opportunity. My Dad taught me so many things in my life (e.g. how to fish, steer a boat, drive a car, throw a baseball, etc...), but the most important thing he taught me was that if you really want something you have to work for it. Whatever success I've achieved in my life is in no small part due to my Dad.

About a year before he died it became apparent that my Dad's health was taking a turn for the worse. At that point he had already been on dialysis for a few years, was nearly bedridden and honestly he was tired of living. He started to tell everyone that he wanted to stop the dialysis, which of course would lead to his death. This greatly upset my nephew Michael (who was 20 at the time), as my Dad has always been a father figure to him. I knew that Michael wasn't ready for his Grandfather to die and I also knew the only thing keeping my Dad alive was the thought of seeing me and his grandkids (Alex & Nick) one last time. Because of this I held off on flying back home as long as I could to give Michael some more time with his Grandfather.

Finally last June I realized that my Dad definitely wasn't going to get better, so I made plans to fly back to New Jersey with my family to say goodbye. My family and I got to spend two last days with him, which meant a lot to all of us. When it was time for us to leave my Dad & I both broke down crying (Italians are not a stoic people!) and I told him how much I loved him and how great a father he had been to me. After we left my Dad refused to eat and stopped dialysis and all of his meds. Eighteen days later he was dead and I flew back to New Jersey for the funeral. It was hard, but at the same time I felt like we had closure. My Dad always knew that I loved him and I always knew that he loved me. I don't think you can ask for anything more than that in life.

In the last years of his life my Dad and I would often talk about religion, death and the afterlife. I don't usually quote song lyrics in my posts, but there's a song that Bono wrote for his father when he was nearing death that sums up perfectly what we talked about.

One Step Closer

I'm 'round the corner from anything that's real
I'm across the road from hope
I'm under a bridge in a rip tide
That's taken everything I call my own

One step closer to knowing
One step closer to knowing

I'm on an island at a busy intersection
I can't go forward, I can't turn back
Can't see the future
It's getting away from me
I just watch the tail lights glowing

One step closer to knowing
One step closer to knowing
One step closer to knowing
Knowing, knowing

I'm hanging out to dry
With my old clothes
Finger still red with the prick of an old rose
Well the heart that hurts
Is a heart that beats
Can you hear the drummer slowing?

One step closer to knowing
One step closer to knowing
One step closer to knowing
To knowing, to knowing, to knowing