RUSH: Diane in Lake Worth, Florida, right down the road from us here. Hi, Diane.
CALLER: How are you?
RUSH: Fine, thank you.
CALLER: I want to say thank you so much to your listening audience and to you. I’m a grandmother who has a grandson who has leukemia, and I just — I’m speechless that you and your listeners are doing this. A lot of breakthroughs have come, and they give him an 87, 90% chance of cure rate.
RUSH: That’s great news.
CALLER: It is. It’s great news.
RUSH: It’s great news, and that’s the case with more and more people who get diagnosed with this stuff.
CALLER: Mmm-hmm.
RUSH: And you’re right: a lion’s share of this is because of the people in this audience.
CALLER: Absolutely. We need the research, and that’s where it’s going, and that’s where it really does need to go, to the research so children, adults, whatever, won’t have to suffer with blood cancer.
RUSH: Yeah. Well, and not only that, but there are so many ancillary benefits here in other areas that the research into the blood cancers benefits as well. Look, folks, you know all of this. I go through the statistics here and the increases of survivability rates and all of this, and it’s great to chronicle it, but the bottom line is that the research has improved and has led to such discoveries that the survivability rates and the cure rates for some of these cancers are just increasing rapidly. You know all of that. You know what this is about. We’ve been doing it. This is our 17th year. People say, ‘What’s the total you’ve raised?’ It’s just north of $17 million, which, if you average it out, would come to a million dollars a year, in less than three hours once a year. Now, I need you to stop and think about that, just how powerful that is. Most things like this will take place over a weekend or two or three days, and they’ll go 24/7 with it or at least 18 hours a day. We do this in one radio show one Friday in April, and we don’t even devote the whole three hours to it.
Of course in the early years, the donations were not as large as they have been in the last three or four years, what with the size of the audience and everything else. I don’t want to retrace our footsteps in history how this all started, but it used to be a nationwide thing with a lot of ABC radio stations involved in it. They do their thing separately now. We do ours separately, just because it worked out to be better off that way. But it’s a tremendous amount of money that has been raised from just this one little radio show in just such a short period of time. People that deal in money and finance and this sort of thing, look at the efficiency of raising money. They ask, ‘How much does it cost to raise money?’ because in a lot of ways there are expenses to raising money, and you have to subtract that from the total you raise. There aren’t any expenses here. Well, you have the phone lines. You have the 877 and the processing of the donations and so forth, but there’s no large, up-front cost here. In addition, 75% of everything donated is going directly to research and patient and family care. So the efficiency, when you take a look at this nearly $17 million that’s been raised since we started this, the amount of time it’s taken to do it and the little up-front costs, this is stunning. It is really stunning, and it’s a testament to you. We all want to feel good about ourselves, and this is one of these things that when you do it, it’ll give you a little inner glow. Because it’s working! Progress is being made, and in some cases, in some of these various forms of blood cancer, it’s rapid.