Leaders from the University of Nebraska Medical Center (UNMC) and its hospital partner, The Nebraska Medical Center announced today preliminary plans for a new cancer center at the medical center’s Omaha campus. The cancer center would house research facilities, an outpatient treatment center and clinic, and a new hospital tower. Medical center leaders call it the largest project ever proposed here.

Because of you, 2011 was a great year for the University of Nebraska.

We feel grateful to all of you who read this newsletter, forward stories to others, post a comment or make a gift. Because of you, amazing things happen at the university. Deserving students are receiving scholarships and advancements are being made in cancer research, agriculture, early-childhood education and other areas important to Nebraskans and the world. 

We feel thankful to work at a place that gives the opportunity to change lives every day. To start off 2012, we are sharing with you the stories of several people who are really, really thankful, too.

Happy New Year!

Nebraska nonprofit organizations striving to address critical community needs or wishing to make a significant local or state impact may now submit funding ideas to Women Investing in Nebraska (WIN).

For information and to submit an online letter of inquiry for consideration, go to womeninvestinginnebraska.org by March 1.

By 2003, Eric Silvius had not heard his wife speak in 13 years.

Multiple sclerosis had taken her voice. It had taken her ability to swallow. Her arms. Her legs. Her clear vision. It had taken the job she loved as a psychologist. 

But her voice, which Penny lost around 1990, was the hardest test for the Silviuses because it affected the way they communicated as husband and wife.

The Silviuses, both Navy veterans, moved from California to Lincoln in 2002 when Eric took a job as an executive with Meyer Foods. In 2003, Penny had throat surgery in Omaha.

One morning a few days after the surgery, Eric took a phone call at work. The voice on the other end was hoarse.

But he knew it instantly.

I think my voice is coming back!

“It was like Christmas when you’re a kid,” Eric said. “After that, you couldn’t call our home phone because it was always busy – I think she called up everybody she knew.”

The thankful couple decided to give back.

Find out what they did and how yet another miracle came their way.  

He remembers his mom freaking out.

Scattered around the computer room of their Omaha home were the guts and parts of the family’s first desktop computer.

He was just 12. The computer, a Macintosh, had cost his parents about $3,000.

“I took it apart just to see if I could put back together,” says Ryan Grandgenett, who’s 21 now and a junior studying computer security at UNO’s College of Information Science and Technology.

And he did put it back together.

“Every since I was little, I’ve always been taking things apart and putting them back together,” he says. “As soon as I could use a computer, I was always playing with them, trying to figure out how they worked.

“I grew to really love them.”

Find out how Ryan is being rewarded for that love.

Robert Sahling says he came from “exactly nothing.”

He grew up in the Dust Bowl days on a farm near Kenesaw, Neb. His mother stuck rags into anything that resembled a crack to keep the dirt out.

I suppose I was 4 or 5 when the WPA (Works Progress Administration) came out with a program where if you needed a new outhouse they’d put one up for eight dollars – a two-holer on a concrete base with doors. I don’t know where my dad found the eight dollars, but I remember we got one.

That was a step up, believe me!

Sahling, who started the Sahling Kenworth Inc. truck dealership 40 years ago in Kearney, never went to college. Yet he’s made UNK and its student-athletes a focus of his giving, along with his Kearney church.

He gives back, he says, because he’s grateful for a great life – one he almost didn’t get to live.

Find out what almost killed him as a kid.

For UNL student Dan Wiek, earning the John E. McCue Memorial Scholarship meant that he could go back to school and get a construction-management degree. 

But enrolling in college can be difficult at age 36.

Tack on the pressures of a family and finances, and the strain from college is even greater.

Scholarships like the John E. McCue Memorial Scholarship, Dan says, can take some pressure off of non-traditional students like him.

When UNMC dental student Jake Zitterkopf sat down to write a thank you letter to the people who gave him his scholarship, he never intended to go above and beyond the ordinary.

He simply was showing his gratitude.

In Jake’s letter to Dr. Tom and Bev Evans of Genesee, Colo., he did go above and beyond. He wrote a heart-filled appreciation note saying how thankful he is for the scholarship and how it will change his life.

The letter impressed us here at the NU Foundation, and we looked further into Jake’s story and found another reason he is so grateful for the good things that have come his way in life.

We found out how, not long ago, the 22-year-old had to face death.

Learn more about Jake’s amazing story.

Approximately 2.5 million people in the United States are affected by MS today.

The Munroe-Meyer Institute for Genetics and Rehabilitation (MMI) at the University of Nebraska Medical Center in Omaha is ready to take an exciting new research program to the next level, but needs our support to do this.

The university is testing a radical new device not yet available to the public and not yet approved by the federal government. Preliminary tests have been extremely positive, so it’s important to keep the research moving forward so it’s made available just as soon as possible.

The university has been offered a $25,000 challenge grant if it can first raise $25,000 before December 31, 2011.

MaryAnn Fredrick of St. Paul, Neb., was alone at work when the phone rang.

It was her doctor.

Suddenly, she found herself overwhelmed by medical lingo about treatments, side effects and prognosis for a rare type of invasive breast cancer.

“I was scared to death.”

She worried about how treatments would disrupt her work and life. She searched for the best care and found it just 25 miles away at Grand Island’s Saint Francis Cancer Treatment Center.

Through a first-of-its-kind program, the UNMC Eppley Cancer Center works with
hospitals across Nebraska, including Saint Francis, to bring clinical trials to patients in their own communities.

Learn more about UNMC’s clinical trials network, and how it worked for Fredrick.