RUSH: It’s the 25th annual Leukemia & Lymphoma Society Cure-A-Thon. The 25th annual! It’s 877-379-8888 if you want to donate on the phone. If you want to do it online, it’s rapid, it’s easy, it’s private, it’s at RushLimbaugh.com. When you go to RushLimbaugh.com you can’t miss it there top of the home page, you will see some of the premiums. Let me run through those since we haven’t done that.

When you donate to the cause, of course, you’re helping the doctors and the researchers dedicating their lives to finding a cure. For a contribution of $75 to $99, we’ll send you a Rush Limbaugh T-shirt with a special dedication to Kit — and they’re all new this year. We varied the design just a little bit, and some of the coloring. It’s white with… It’s a really good-looking orange on some of the gear this year.

If you make a gift of $100 or more, we’re gonna add a golf cap to the T-shirt on its way to you. For a generous gift of $375 or more, we’ll put a golf shirt in your size as well as the T-shirt and as well as the cap. The golf shirts are very comfortable to wear. It’s crisp white, comes in custom sizes, and it’s a top brand name. No cheap knock-offs here, as part of our premiums that we’re giving. You can see these in great detail at RushLimbaugh.com when you make your donation.

Or, again, call operators who are working today all during the day at 877-379-8888.

Now, in the first 24 years of our association with the Leukemia & Lymphoma Society and the Cure-A-Thon we have seen so many medical advancements in how doctors can battle these diseases. Just think: It’s blood cancer. Leukemia Lymphoma, non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma. All of this is blood cancer, and just in the last 15 years, nearly 40% of the new anti-cancer drugs first approved for blood cancer patients are now being tested on patients with other forms of cancer.

Lung, prostate, breast cancer. I believe I mentioned earlier that one of the great things that’s happened in the research projects on the blood cancers, is so many discoveries have been made that affect and create treatments for forms of cancer such as lung or prostate or breast cancer. And there’s so many new treatments that doctors can utilize that work to extend the lives of those who have been diagnosed with lymphoma or leukemia.

And all of this happens, all of this has become a reality because of the contributions that you have made to the Cure-A-Thon. They go toward research and treatment refinements. One of the great things that’s happened as a result of your overwhelming generosity is that survival rates for many of the blood cancer diseases and for the patients have doubled and tripled — and, in a few cases, they’ve even quadrupled over a 50-year period of time.

Now, all these advances aside, cancer is still on the march. Approximately every three minutes, somebody in this country’s diagnosed with a blood cancer. Every three minutes. And approximately every 10 minutes, someone dies. Now, this statistic represents nearly 152 people a day, and 18 during the program alone every day. Even though the death rates have decreased since 2000, that’s one person that dies every 10 minutes that means everything to somebody.

That one person is someone’s spouse.

That one person is someone’s child or parent or sibling or friend or coworker.

That one person is not a stat to somebody.

That one person is not a statistic to a lot of people.

For us at the EIB Network, that one person was H.R. Kit Carson. It’s personal. Now, the statistics are what they are, but every diagnosis and every death is deeply personal. You know, I thank God for our nurse from Beverly Hills, Florida, named Connie who called at the end of the previous hour. She was telling us how she tells family members and friends to deal with patients, which is a yeoman piece of advice and effort.

BREAK TRANSCRIPT

RUSH: Rush Limbaugh, on the 25th anniversary of the Leukemia & Lymphoma Society Cure-A-Thon to wipe out the blood cancers. Again, the telephone number for you to donate on the phone if you want to do that is 877-379-8888. You can also donate online at RushLimbaugh.com. It’s a little bittersweet, ’cause on the one hand, what we are doing today is the essence of goodness. On the other hand, we lost our chief of staff just this past January.

And, by the way, this was Kit’s baby.

He worked this all year. It was Kit who stayed in contact representing the program with all Leukemia & Lymphoma Society people. It was Kit who organized much of the coordinating the date every year. He worked tirelessly with the people from the society every year in collecting the data on advances in research and survivability. It was his baby. Like everything else, at the beginning of the program, it just dropped into our lap, and he just adopted it and took it over.

He loved people.

He loved getting to know new people.

He loved working with people, particularly on successful projects, and this was one. Now it’s become personal. That’s the bittersweet side. It claimed him. Like I say, there’s nothing anybody does to warrant deserving this disease. There’s nothing you eat, there’s nothing you do, there’s no behavior that’s gonna make you more likely or anything. You’re just minding your own business one day, and something doesn’t feel right.

You go to the doctor and bam! They hit you over the head with, “You’ve got blood cancer.” Honestly for this, during the course of the 25 years, it always was a disease that affected others. That didn’t mean we weren’t aware of the tragedy and we weren’t aware of the devastation that results, but as you know, it’s always different when it happens to you. It just changes. It becomes even more important.

For us, it justified all the work we’ve done. It made our commitment to this even deeper and everybody involved… We talked about this oncology nurse that called. Kit had some of the best nurses at Sloan Kettering in New York. They actually cried when it was known that the disease was gonna win. They just loved him. Throughout this treatment cycle he went through, he remained positive and upbeat, and even especially in those moments when he was cognizant and aware.

The last day that I saw him, Kathryn and I flew up, and he was in the hospital at Memorial Sloan Kettering. It was still football season, and the Packers had a playoff game coming up. It was his team, and we’re talking about these things, and when it came time to leave — we’d been there a few hours. When it came time to leave, he looked at us — his kids had been in the room and his wife, Theresa — and he said, “This was a good day. This was a good day,” ’cause he’d had everyone he loved around him.

His family and her family were there, and there he was — you know, with blood cancer — saying, “Good day. This was a good day.” You tear up and you walk out of the room, but we knew what he meant. We knew what he meant. What he meant was that he was fortunate that he knew, on that particular day, who everybody was when they were there. Yeah, it had gotten deeply into his brain, and it was downhill after that. It’s amazing all these things timing-wise work out.

That’s the point, folks: It’s bittersweet.

On the one hand, it’s all good works, and it’s all well-intentioned and supremely good motivation. On the other hand, to be impacted personally by it — even though it may not have been necessary — helps me personally to understand what everybody going through that experiences this and the fear, the unknown, the real desire for hope that everybody involved has. Even up to the last minute, there is a never, ever surrendering.

It’s a constant hope that something is going to happen, and it is servicing that hope that so many good things happen from Leukemia & Lymphoma Society of America. It’s not just medical research. It’s not just expanding survivability and all the tangible things. It is the experience they bring and can share, helping everybody outside the patient. It’s in addition to patient, but outside the family and friends and so forth, which is really a very important aspect of all.

It’s such great work that they do, and it’s brought home to us even more how important it is and how wonderful all of you have been over the course of these 25 years.

It’s 877-379-8888 on the phone, and RushLimbaugh.com if you want to donate online.