As a college athlete, Ralph Russo learned that success comes from good planning and paying attention to the details. "I've always been detail oriented and structured," Russo said. "I never felt comfortable going into this without proper planning."

"This" was a lifesaving transplant in 2004, the culmination of a long and well-planned course of treatment for non-Hodgkin's lymphoma. The journey took nine years to complete and brought the Lebanon, N. J., man and his family across the country more than once to prepare for the infusion of his own stem cells.

Looking back, Ralph can trace the first signs that something was wrong to his college baseball years. He remembers his lymph nodes enlarging much of the year and he felt like he had "lost a step" during professional tryouts. Ralph chalked it up to too much fun with the guys and dropped his plan of a baseball career. Several years later in 1997, after feeling chronically sluggish, he went to a new doctor. "I found out I had been walking around with low-grade non-Hodgkin's lymphoma for eight or nine years," he said.

After a few years of different treatments with up and down success, Ralph turned to Hutchinson Center researchers for what he hoped would be a cure: a stem-cell transplant. In 2002, he traveled to Seattle to harvest his own stem cells; at the time, his marrow was clear of cancer, making a transplant of his own cells possible.

Today, Ralph said he's at "100 percent strength and busy as ever," including coaching baseball and football and singing in a blues band.

"The Center is a well-oiled machine," Ralph said. "It has the ability to care for a lot of people without losing the personal touch that is imperative to an individual patient's well-being and ability to get through the process."

	2005 Patient Reunion Photo Gallery