The money has been counted and the smell of bread sticks will soon fill the air. National Junior Honor Society has just finished collecting money as part of the 13th annual Pasta for Pennies national fundraising campaign. Each fourth-period class collected money for the Leukemia & Lymphoma Society with an eye toward winning a free pasta party provided by Olive Garden. John Krehbiel’s physics class finished first with $193.95 followed by Carrie Aune’s English class with $148.36 and Susan Orton’s math clas with $101.29. A total of $693.33 was collected schoolwide.

“This fund-raiser is to raise money for the Leukemia & Lymphoma Society. They use these funds to research cures, and to help the families that have been inflicted by these diseases,” NJHS sponsor Anthony Raheb said. “I find it very close to my heart because my father past away from leukemia.”

The Leukemia & Lymphoma Society helps blood-cancer patients live better, longer lives through the advancement of research.

“The mission of the Leukemia & Lymphoma Society is to cure leukemia, lymphoma, Hodgkin’s disease and myeloma, and improve the quality of life of patients and their families to advance the diagnosis and treatment of blood cancers through continued funding of academic research,” Raheb said.

The class that collected the most money receives a pasta party lunch courtesy of the Olive Garden.

“I want them to have a cure,” Raheb said. “I wouldn’t want other families to have to go through the terrible stress that my family had to go through. Pasta for Pennies was done by other clubs before, so when this opportunity was presented to us, we decided to do it.”

Krehbiel was diagnosed with Hodgkin’s lymphoma in 2005 and got treated in 2006.

“How this ties into Pasta for Pennies is to support the Leukemia & Lymphoma Society. And so they are the society that does research to try to cure Leukemia & Lymphoma, that I was actually cured of it from research that this organization had done earlier. Specifically, my treatment was standard chemotherapy, so I lost my hair, and then radiation treatment. But in the chemotherapy, there was this special targeted protein they put in [the treatment] that had been designed to basically combat the particular lymphoma I had,” Krehbiel said.

The Leukemia & Lymphoma Society had made great inroads into the cure for Hodgkins lymphoma in previous years.

“The treatment I got, I think was relatively one or two years old by the time I got it, so a bunch of people 10 to 15 years ago gave their money and they came up with the cure that I got to take advantage of,” Krehbiel said. “If you ever watch ‘House,’ like everyone ends up with lymphoma in a bunch of the episodes because there are like 20 or 30 different types of lymphoma. So they need money to research how to cure the different types. So when you hear people say, somebody’s going to cure cancer, we actually can cure some types of cancer, like the type of lymphoma I had. I’m cured of iy, but it takes a bunch of money and research. That is what the money from Pasta for Pennies is for.”

By Daphna Krause