welcome to doing work that matters a celebration of survivorship with our special guest tammy haneke tammy it's great to be able to meet with you and to discuss the leukemia lymphoma society of pittsburgh and your role as a nominee for woman of the year congratulations on making the usual much any thank you for having me today and the special honor yes sure larry i'm sure it's a highlight of your life it is it is one that i never expected though i have to say that much of it i think the rest of us the tammy is competing for the honor of woman of the year for the leukemia lymphoma society by engaging in an amazing fund raising campaign and so we're going to start off and find out a little bit  tammy if you would to share with the audience how the funds that are being raised will be used and also how does this fund raising campaign work i'm so excited to finally know more about how fund raising works as a role so wh discovered about how the ls funding work is that we're looking at trying to obviously improve cancer research treatment advances for patients that are currently diagnosed with cancer but also looking at improving the quality of life for the patients and survivors as well so the way the competition works is that every dollar raised in this competition counts as one vote and the person with the most votes at the end is crowned the winner oh wow how many people are you competing against you know yes there are eleven of us in the competition but that's two different competitions man and woman so right now i know there are six women vying for the nytol of woman of the year all right terrific so now i know knowing you you thrown yourself headlong into this fund raising campaign but i i would like to know a little bit more about how you became involved with zucchini lymphoma society ok there's a little tiny bit of a back story there only because in the last few years as i was getting closer to this twenty year mark i was starting to really think about how am i going to celebrate this anniversary because when i was diagnosed with cancer i was twenty two years old and i was in graduate school and i was trying to get married and i was trying to graduate i was trying to find my first job there was a lot of things going on so i imagine that at twenty two when they say you have a survival rate at three years and five years and ten years three years maybe twenty five such a rule and then to reach the age of thirty i was i made if a thirty and all the sudden those next ten years went by so fast and i was turning forty so all of a sudden the anniversary was here even though it seemed in the beginning like how my ever going to reach the anniversary and know that i'm cancer free so i had already been thinking about this a little bit about what will i do to commemorate it in a really special way and nothing in it really come to me so i think the opportunity actually kind of fell out of the sky into my lap divine intervention if you want to call it that and one of my clients from my fitness business and her best friend came to me and said we think that you should run for a woman of the year and my first response was automatically i know i just i don't know what i don't how to do this but then when i thought a little bit more about it and they explained what was going to happen i thought there's no way i cannot do this like just step out of your comfort zone do something really scary and frightening commit to a really big number and do this because at the end of it you can say that you celebrated your twentieth year of survivorship by really giving back to the world in a way that i had never really imagined i would or that i'd be able to so that how could you say no to that that's why i'm here today six weeks into the competition i have four more to go have you been involved in the society prior to this no i had not the only thing i've ever looked into years ago was potentially running the marathon for their program called team in training and i thought i can't run a marathon can't do that but you know i didn't know there were a lot of other projects that the ls actually supports and it has even in this city of pittsburgh that you know people can participate in to show their to your story into your journey as a survivor what are some of the highlights or aspects of this journey that have touched you the most or have taught you things that maybe you wouldn't have experienced because you are a survivor well in the very beginning you know my first quest was to simply survive and once that moment had come the next issue for my my new husband and i cause i was only engaged whenever i was diagnosed my husband bob and i started thinking right away about having a family because they had told us right away that might be a huge issue for me given that i had gone through chemotherapy and at that moment in time it wasn't so much of a priority but then a year or two later when i was finally healthy and the doctor said you know you can consider this i thought we better start trying to have a family because it might maybe a process for us but it was not and my daughter marissa was born a year later so you think i was a young mom at twenty five so i was one of one of the scariest things i think in the very beginning of the journey was could being pregnant having a child kick my cancer back out of remission and when that didn't happen and she was born healthy and perfect sheet she has been the greatest miracle of the entire survivorship journey and she's seventeen and she's off to college and it's immediately young yes so part of the thank you so part of the competition you know the reason i'm doing it is really to leave a legacy to her because she has been the light of my life that i could have never expected in the very beginning of the journey i just i couldn't forsee that so you know then i became this young mom and i just so i decided well i can't spend any time waiting for life to happen you know i think it's very easy to say one day i'll do all these things one day i want to try that maybe maybe one day when i have more time maybe when my daughter's in college i'll try this or try that and for me i don't think it was conscious i think it was just this this subconscious feeling of like i have to do everything now in case i never have the opportunity again so when i think about my journey of survivor i'm sure that it has seemed that you know i've lived with almost a sense of urgency in order to do all these things do all the things in order to make sure that i live my life the way i really want to the way i'd imagined pre cancer and then everything changes so because of that i think i have done things in the last twenty years that many people would not have imagined until much later in life one of the things i always wanted to do was to become a competitive ballroom dancer so when ricin was only about three years old i started that journey and i danced  here in the city of pittsburgh and on the competition circuit for a number of years that was an amazing experience in itself you know training with ballroom champions that i had seen on t v and all the sudden i was taking lessons from them and competing and that was an amazing experience and then when that when that time of my life ended you know someone who always goes forth with another goal in mind and the next one then was to become a fitness instructor and not only did i do that but then i launched into well if i'm going to feed in my head and my speech because i had never taught a class ever and there it was being alive filmed on camera for the news and she was standing right there and i had to to perform that class for her so you know i would have never imagined that i would have met some of the people that i've trained with in the fitness industry either had that journey started so i would say that was probably about the first fifteen years of my journey and then something really distressing happened in our personal world a really close friend of ours from those graduate school days the the wife was diagnosed with a blood cancer and she lost her fight to that blood cancer within a year and i was stricken with such guilt first of all we had our friendship had become a long distance relationship so i really didn't know how sick she was i knew that she was sick but i hadn't heard much so i thought she's doing great she must be doing great and i got the news not even a year later that she had passed and i was i was horribly guilt stricken because i thought you know the last fifteen years i've been doing all these things and they're so much fun and everyone's like oh you're so inspiring because of this life that you've had after cancer you show us all that cancer doesn't have to be something so scary that there's life after cancer but i thought but it's only my life i'm not doing anything of consequence for anybody else and i felt so guilty because now my daughter had me and why did tracy's daughter not have her so that was the same month that i decided to transition from just being a fit instructor here in the city to actually forming my own fitness company and becoming a nutritional wellness coach which is what i've been doing the last five years so i know now that that purpose has let me help a lot of people you know you've yes because i really i really believe that you know that that happy lifestyle that people want and craving are looking for you know comes from a place of being healthy as well because there are many things that you may aspire to want to do but if you're not in good shape physically from a health standpoint can you do all these things that we should have the opportunity to experience in our life so that's that's kind of where the purpose has has taken me the last five years which has been about twenty five percent now of that world of experiences too in itself just some of the trips that i've taken and some of the the growth strides that i've made as a coach and as a fitness instructor within that time to because that's my business you know and i want my business to be about helping other people  you're doing that and to the boy so you know you're in this you're in the throes of this campaign in the middle of it and what do you hope to achieve overall through your participation in this campaign well my very first my very first goal in the in the competition they asked us to set a monetary amount of money that we wanted to try to raise so my goal again i was frightened to death that you know this was something i couldn't do so i thought if i can honor my survivorship by raising one thousand dollars for every year that i've survived that's twenty thousand for twenty years so that's my very first goal to raise twenty thousand dollars for the last my second goal would be to reach that benchmark a fit two thousand dollars because at that point the candidates are able to attach that money to research korea and i can name that in on or of someone and because of tracy's presence in my life and the impact that her life and then her passing had on the direction of my life i would really like to be able to to reach that goal to name that grant for her and i think the third one i think this competition and the experience has just opened my eyes to what charity work looks like outside of our little bubble in which we live in you know and it's taught me so many things about how giving and generous people really are you know i think we're bombarded by so much in the media on how negative things are all around us i think this is something that brings out good in people and i've just been astonished at the generosity of people who don't know me at all but when i call and ask for help there they are and giving in ways that i never expected and then also just what's happened here in the community with my kids here about our hill you know it's just been astounding to me so i look at it as another opportunity now next dimension of my life what other kinds of organizations or charity work will i support given that i've had a significant level support my  own so many of them out there there are some wonderful people i knew so in your campaign then you've done several projects how about sharing with us a little bit about those projects that you've accomplished so far so far within the first six weeks we've been really busy we have attempted to try to mobilize all the different avenues of my life and all the different hats that i wear so you know beyond just seeking out the online and the snail mail donation campaign which is what most people are accustomed to when they're there looking at raising money for a cause i wanted to make sure that i had something that was memorable from all these phases soul within my fitness world we've been trying to hos various of fund raising fitness parties in the city and those have been really fun we've had like a big zoom a party for you know dancers for cancers we've had one called pedal and pound out cancer which was a spin and the power to work out of an i was lots of fun  we have another one coming up near the end of this campaign called a sweaty and sparkly cinco de mayo fitness parties really go together so they do whenever i see each other when i'm involved in that and we also designed like a commemorative fitness shirt that has a on it it says because i can and when people ask me what does that mean i think about that a lot because people say i don't know how you work out a fire i am a do what you do and teach these classes i do it because i can because at one point when i was twenty two years old i was too sick to get off the couch and my mom had to hold on to me walking around a parking lot just to get me moving after chemotherapy so it doesn't matter how hard it feels i do that because a long time ago i could not so that h people loved it and i think they can identify everyone somewhere in their life they can identify with that and then we also how we had a restaurant series because i like food and i host a snack scene with a restaurant here is called stuff your face for cancer so we had a but one where the thing that we were doing as far as a corporate sponsorship package was something called project easter bunny where small businesses had the opportunity to sponsor an easter basket that would be then delivered to a child at children's hospital at easter undergoing cancer treatment so that and i'm really hoping that i'll get to be involved in the delivery of those baskets you know and they're not full of candy they're actually full of lots of money and manipulative and toys that the kids can play with right from their bed incase they can't get out of  that was really special to me you know only raising funds paying it forward and i love getting you know i love kids so how do i get my kids involved that was my next part i thought i'm a teacher how do i mobilize what's happened with the snack scene in the support that i've had with that program the last four years has been a huge part of my life our hill and specially when i started my business because i thought if i'm helping adults get healthy i need to start where it all starts with these little teeny ones that trust me in this home environment called power hill elementary school so i thought let's do something fun with food and the ls already has a program called pennies for patients where schools can do collection drives and i thought let me do a similar program here of our help call pennies for pies so that word yes i went into thirty one classrooms i made a stop in to every classroom and i just wanted to spend a few minutes with them explaining why we were doing this and why it was important to mrs haneke and when the kids found out that i had cancer the looks on their faces and i said it's ok i'm good mrs yannick not sick but i don't want anyone else to be sick so what if we all work together and my team has seven hundred little people on it that are going to help me raise money for those doctors to fight cancer the kids were like and it has been amazing we ran the drive for two weeks and i'm in the process now of counting all the coins this is it's quite the undertaking because if you were big they were and big pretzel jars gay big and i am astonished at the amount of of money these children have donated and i'm sure you're wondering like what is the prize what got them all excited about that is that the winning classroom actually earns a pie in the face party with me because i'm that kind of teacher that would happily take a twenty five pies in the face if i never ad to see any single one of them go through chemotherapy the way that they play well now when they're going to like take the pie and like refreshment afterwards for the winning classrooms we're going to have a pie party sponsored by family deli so i feel very blessed to have that happening to so that's my pennies for pies campaign and i actually have a chance to go to the power will be stroke and share that information about what we did how much money we raised as a school and let everyone to be stroked see that really fun video of the pie in the face party i hope i'm going to be i don't know what that's going to look like i don't know what i'll look like at the end of that but that's ok like i said i i will do anything for these kids after what they've done for me well and when you with all of your high energy you have all these multitude of projects that are going on but that's not all no i have i have some of the best ones coming as i like saving the best for last but i can expect that because again offer to unities have come to me throughout the campaign as to where i couldn't say no to the generosity of people willing to donate their time so is that what you would like me to just head about next one of the first things happening actually is on may second and i didn't know this but the big burrito restaurant group that has a restaurant like eleven and sober and mad max and so forth they actually sponsor different charity dinners throughout the year if you apply for them so i actually won one of the charity dinners so i have yes i have thirty five seats only available at mad max and canons bergen that's on may second and that's a benefit dinner where they donate one hundred percent of the proceeds back to us to the campaign so people can know that their donation money that evening is actually one hundred percent going to the l o s it's incredible that is incredible i wish i could have more people there you know but i have thirty five seats available for that one so that's my first one coming up and then we do have our may fifth fitness event which is going to be happening out at faster pittsburgh and robinson township that will be really fun looking forward to that and i'll be there in attendance and probably leading a little bit of that work out even though i have friends that are volunteering their time to me as part of their involvement campaign may sixth we are completely blessed to have the local celebrity pittsburgh dad oh i love pittsburgh yes dad is coming to a restaurant twelve whiskey barbecue in the south side for twenty dollars a ticket people will have the opportunity to come and do a meet and greet with pittsburgh dad we have a local comedian doing a set that night as well and we also having a night of trivia and then we'll have a lot of raffle baskets and specials and so forth that night but i'm someone who wants to give people value for their money so again that's when our ticket actually is one hundred percent donated back to my campaign but people coming will get a full night of entertainment out of that so i just feel like i need to be able to have some kind of memory created with these fundraising opportunities may seventh we have a wine tasting at washington winery so it's kind of a ladies afternoon out at the vendor show the people can come and have a wine tasting their ticket guarantees them that wine tasting and a choice of their beverage as a as a sip and shop so we're excited about that that's fairly low world that located in washington right downtown washington or in washington winery and then if that isn't enough that weekend's a big one right at the end of my campaign we decided to have something that was just going to be a true celebration and there's a restaurant and canons burger that's called the hoff bra so we so it's open to the public anyone can come and eat and drink and be merry we're going to have a big party that night i want to be a real fun casual party we're going to have additional drink specials there and it just should be a place where we can just finally connect and celebrate that we made it through the end of the campaign and to go out with a bang so when does the campaign officially end may twentieth so the so on may twentieth we have a grand finale gala at heinz field and no one knows the answer as to who will be crowned man or woman of the year until that night on the stage because even that night we still have the opportunity for silent auctions that again the the auction items that we contribute and we have some from i think chip ganassi racing in the steelers and so forth those proceeds from the silent auction go to my campaign people attending the auction that money goes to my campaign so there's still opportunities as a gala to be adding to our final totals and that's why it's not announced until at the gala at the last minute so it should be like right to the end just kind of attention although i know by now it is exciting like now where we're almost at the midpoint of the campaign and i'm just so overwhelmed by what's happened in the first six weeks of it that i just can't ask for anything more but yet it's still just so much fun to be had i was going to say this is incredible part of your journey and that is involving so many aware of how many saw what we call solid cancers can be are being treated by some of the advances made in blood cancers so i feel like what we're doing really matters not for blood cancers but for everyone for all cancers and that's why it's important at this point where though this is a great story i think your enthusiasm and your commitment to the health and wellness of others as well is now to the leukemia lymphoma society and we are just taken aback by that so remarkable you know we're all familiar here in peter's township with your snack scene and the impact that's had on children to let them know to start those healthy life now now as well as your own personal fitness business in raising a daughter and teaching in you know working in your family unit we recognize you as a person who cares and that is important that's a quality and despite the challenges of cancer that are present in impacted in that you've been impacted by the disease you've taken the goodness out of that and through the door and looked at the light and said we can make this a good thing and so people shouldn't feel disheartened when they get that diagnosis they should know that there are good outcomes out of there and that they too can contribute to help others along the way who may suffer from the same disease i want to thank you personally for sharing your story in for raising all of these important hands for research tammy we're rooting for you  you have any final words that you would like to share with people you know i just the more i think about this i really just believe that i think there are causes that are important to all of us and they're all important you know and i think we all have both the power and the responsibility and the opportunities to really do work that matters and when you do the wealth that comes back in your life is better than any paycheck that you could ever be given it's just such a different feeling and i'm just so blessed the next chapter of my life will include that now and all the lives you've touched in the lives that touch you and help so i was just saying it's all back and making those connections right it is about a personal touch well and so to all of those  are watching and who enjoyed tammy has to say and want to support her efforts to raise the most funds please visit her fund raising page and you'll see it here on the screen it's kind of a long u r l or website page that's there and we want to thank you so much for supporting tammy and for supporting the leukemia lymphoma society in for reaching out and helping others and to me thank you so much for sharing your journey your personal journey with everyone and also your efforts and we wish you the best of luck and hope you become number one thank you thanks for everything you know i want to thank you thank you very