Sustaining the Fight

On a Friday in October 1944, Rudolph and Antoinette Roesler de Villiers left a New York hospital with an irreplaceable absence. Their 16-year-old son, Robert, his life just beginning, died of leukemia earlier that day. In their grief the Roesler de Villierses discovered a hole they hoped to fill with the memory of Robert. 

Five years later, the Roesler de Villierses, frightened by the certainty of fatality a leukemia diagnosis signaled, began a fundraising and education organization in Robert’s name. Operating out of a small office on Wall Street, the Robert Roesler de Villiers Foundation, which later became the Leukemia and Lymphoma Society (LLS), functioned with the intention of finding treatments for what was then considered a death sentence. The foundation’s 1955 annual report documenting updates on leukemia research said, with grave finality, “As of this date, leukemia is 100% fatal.” Now, nearly 70 years later, partly as a result of the research and education LLS has helped support, the five-year survival rate for all subtypes of leukemia is 65%. 

The rigor of research surrounding leukemia and lymphoma over the last 75 years is also why, in September 2021, when Caroline Dunn ’25 was diagnosed with high-risk, B-cell acute lymphoblastic leukemia, the doctor, within the same breath of delivering the diagnosis, was able to reassure Caroline and her family that she would survive. 

Caroline received the preliminary word abruptly. She was experiencing headaches with a severity beyond the casual, take-a-pill-and-relax type. She noticed inexplicable bruises on her skin. Exhaustion persisted beyond a single sleepless night. She went to the doctor, who misdiagnosed her with a form of depression. That didn’t seem quite right, she remembers thinking, and so pursued more blood tests. When those returned, she was rushed to the Children’s Emergency Department at VCU and was then summarily admitted to the Pediatric ICU. 

A sinking sensation: Not me, especially not at this age. “This shouldn’t be happening,” she thought when her doctors began telling her they were running tests to identify any cancer cells in her blood. “I’m 14, I eat healthy, I’m active. It didn’t seem possible.”

She decided to put her Freshman year at Collegiate on pause, completing assignments from home when she could. She began receiving weekly — sometimes daily — chemotherapy. “That first year of chemo treatments was really intense,” she says. She received a port installation in her chest, dozens of spinal infusions, blood and platelet transfusions. By design, her immune system, because of the chemo, was therapeutically devastated. Nausea and exhaustion were magnified by the treatment. She suffered from neuropathy, a condition that results from nerve damage to the peripheral nervous system. Her weakness intensified. She experienced stroke-like symptoms, used leg braces and underwent hair loss. “There were a lot of things that I had to endure during the process that felt exhausting, really brutal to go through.” She recalls a period of eight weeks where she would spend a week in the hospital every two weeks, a dizzying, draining frequency. “It was a constant 24-to-38-hour drip of chemo, delivered from this huge bag of this bright yellow, radioactive-looking fluid, and I couldn’t leave the hospital until I had completely drained that fluid from my system. So, following the chemo, it was a constant pumping of IV bags and drinking a lot of water to then get that stuff out of my system.”

In between her weeklong hospital visits, her days felt onerous but free, an unfurling invitation to relish the minor moments of happiness — a free afternoon to read, a chance to learn a new recipe and attune herself to the burst of the dish’s flavors. She was reading Patti Smith’s memoir Just Kids one afternoon in March 2021, her bedroom window opened a crack to listen to the rain speak gently to the roof. The light was soft, mingled with the wet speckled grass, a warm moisture giving the air a sweet perfume. Life was good, after all. “I joke with people that I’m a better person now because I had cancer, just because I learned so much throughout those three years,” Caroline says. “I learned the importance of truly looking on the bright side, which I always took with a grain of salt as something easier said than done. I really tried picking out those little positive parts of my day and making it into the biggest parts of my day. Those little bits of happiness were really, really important.”

During Caroline’s first year of treatment, she attended a fundraiser, organized by the Leukemia and Lymphoma Society, to support a friend of hers going through a similar treatment. The fundraiser was the Student Visionaries of the Year campaign, a seven-week effort with the goal of helping fund blood cancer research, the same goal Rudolph and Antoinette Roesler de Villiers had when they began the organization in 1949, and the same goal that helped increase Caroline’s own survival rate. 

Three years later, shortly after receiving her final treatments in January 2024, she was nominated to participate in the Student Visionaries of the Year campaign. She asked her brother Peyton ’24 and her friend Jack Callaghan ’25 to join her fundraising team. Both immediately said yes, and the group began echoing Caroline’s story in the hopes of raising money for cancer research. “I’ve seen firsthand the impact LLS has had in providing impactful treatment, medicine, and care to help save my life,” Caroline says. “I want to make sure that anyone who ever faces this diagnosis has even better treatment options in the future.”

Each group participating in the Student Visionaries of the Year campaign sets a fundraising goal at the beginning of the event, specifying a monetary amount they hope to reach by the end of the seven weeks. Caroline’s team asked the organizers what the previous record in Virginia was for the most money raised during the campaign. They learned the record was $80,000, so Caroline decided to set her mark at $100,000. Why not be ambitious? By the end of the campaign, after reaching out to Collegiate friends and the greater Richmond community, Caroline’s team raised $109,000. 

“As someone who, 40 years earlier, would have practically had a death sentence because of my diagnosis, being able to personally give back to LLS and further that research is really important to me,” Caroline says. “To contribute to the work that allows some of my friends with blood cancers to complete big milestones like graduation — to continue with their lives, really — is powerful.”