“Our son came back from Iraq at 24 a soldier. He was diagnosed with Hodgkin’s lymphoma and spent the next two years in a hell far greater than the war he had come from.”

Ann St. John of Bloomington, Ind., will never forget the people at the University of Nebraska Medical Center and the top-notch care they gave her son, Zachary May.

He would have died the night in May 2007 when they airlifted him to the medical center, she says. Instead, those people, along with the medical center’s cutting-edge lymphoma researchers, extended Zachary’s life for a year. He died May 4, 2008.

Ann will never forget the gift of one last Christmas together.

“That Christmas morning, I wrote a letter to the fundraisers in Omaha, and I said, ‘Thank you. Thank you so much. Thank you so much for the research dollars that you gave 10, 20, 30 years ago. Because without those research dollars, I would not be spending Christmas with my boy.’”

A cancer survivor herself now, Ann and other survivors and UNMC researchers discuss in this touching video how research dollars – especially those from private funding – will one day win the war against lymphoma.

Unsatisfied with a diagnosis that would have meant waiting for the slow-growing carcinoid cancer tumors on her liver to take her life, she turned to The Nebraska Medical Center, the teaching hospital of the University of Nebraska Medical Center.

The initiative is the idea of Ken Tolton of Atlantic, Iowa, co-owner of Duke Aerial, Inc., a construction equipment rental business. Tolton’s wife, Linda, was diagnosed with stage four pancreatic cancer in July and was given six months to one year to live. She is only 45 years old.