News

Making Music for Mark to assist wellness fund

Posted October 15, 2009 11:00 pm

By Christie Willhite

For months, Mark Perry dealt with growing pain. Backache, hip soreness, leg pain.

He was 20 years old and figured he'd just overdone it, either in the pool where he was a lifeguard or horsing around with his friends.

But the pain didn't go away and chiropractors' adjustments didn't help. And none of that explained the lump in his abdomen that was initially diagnosed as a hernia.

That "hernia" turned out to be a lymph node raging with an aggressive form of cancer so rare that while Mark was being treated, he was thought to have the world's only active case of ALK+ diffused B-cell lymphoma.

For eight months, specialists at Northwestern University Medical Center worked with Mark, racing to catch up with the cancer that had gone undiagnosed for months and working to develop effective treatments for the disease with little research available to them.

While Mark was hospitalized, his mother, Donna Perry, and family friend Mike Bresnahan, took leaves from their jobs and spent as much time as possible with Mark. They encouraged his friends to visit.

Trips from Bloomingdale to downtown Chicago can add up quickly, so Bresnahan organized a fundraiser in March to help offset the family's expenses and to pay for Mark's friends to visit him.

A second fundraiser was already in the works when Mark died in September. On Saturday, Oct. 17, Making Music for Mark will commemorate his life and raise money for the Mark Perry Wellness Fund. Proceeds from the concert will help Perry and Bresnahan, now engaged, finish paying the medical expenses. The remaining money will be given to a family in a similar situation, Bresnahan said.

Bresnahan tells us more about the fundraising efforts.

Q. What's your mission?

A. Originally our plan was to raise money to help pay for hospital-related expenses. Between parking, gas and food, having Mark at a hospital in downtown Chicago was not cheap. As his illness continued and expenses mounted, money was needed to help pay for things like the mortgage and utility bills as both his mother and I took leaves of absence from work through most of Mark's time at Northwestern University Medical Center.

Now that Mark's journey has come to an end, the next step in our journey has begun. With our next endeavor, we hope to ease some of the financial burden we have incurred over the past eight months and begin the next phase of our mission to "pay it forward" to the next family that finds itself in a similar situation.

Q. Who do you serve?

A. The fund helps Mark's family and hopefully, depending on its success, families in a similar situation in caring for a terminally ill child or spouse.

Q. When and why you start the wellness fund? How has it grown?

A. We started about a month before the first fundraiser, Lose the Mane for Mark in March. It was originally set up to help with expenses incurred in going to Northwestern, especially for Mark's friends. These college kids/young adults do not have the money to go downtown often, so we created this fund to help with that.

It was very important to Mark and his family to have his friends visit as often as possible. The money from the first fundraiser helped "the kids" feel comfortable enough financially to visit him weekly.

The wellness fund has grown more than I ever could have hoped. We raised about $7,500 from the first fundraiser along with individual donations from friends, family members and even people we have never met but who saw Mark's story in the Daily Herald last March.

Q. What kind of successes have you had?

A. To me, the biggest success we have seen so far was Mark's friends being able to visit every weekend. The joy it brought Mark was everything we wanted it to be. He would look forward to them coming and almost kick us out when they arrived. Even at his worst, he would look forward to their visit and fight through any discomfort or pain to smile when they walked in.

Another thing the fund helped with was allowing Donna and I to take leaves of absence from our jobs to spend Mark's last eight months in the hospital with him. Because of others' generosity, Mark was able to spend much more time with his friends and we could be with him during a very trying and horrific time in his life.

Q. What challenges do you face now?

A. The fund is almost depleted. With Making Music for Mark, we hope to replenish the fund to help offset the financial hardships we are facing and pave the way to help other families who may be going through the same type of situation. For Donna and I, this is a new venture. While we have both organized and participated in a variety of charity work for organizations such as Misericordia and Alzheimers Association, building a charity of our own has been a new learning experience and a challenge we look forward to taking on.

Q. What do you wish the community at large knew about the organization?

A. The one thing I would like for people to know is "Mark's Story"- it can be found on the Web site, makingmusicformark.com.

I want people to know how generosity and caring helped Donna, Mark and I endure the most horrific of all situations. I want to say thank you.

Q. How can readers get involved?

A. By coming out, helping us honor Mark's memory and supporting the Mark Perry Wellness Fund at the Making Music for Mark fundraiser. We'll have a variety of raffles, so donations of both money and raffle items would be appreciated.

For more information, contact me at (773) 983-4718 or crash19657@yahoo.com.

Making Music for Mark Why: To help offset a Bloomingdale family's medical expenses and start a fund to help other families When: Saturday, Oct. 17; doors open at 2 p.m., music from 4 to 8 p.m. Where: Curtainwall Services, 910 Riverside Drive, Elmhurst Details: Jack Mosley Band performs; beer and food for sale Cost: $20 Info: <a href="http://makingmusicformark.com" target="new">makingmusicformark.com</a> Mark Perry Wellness Fund Wish list: Items to be raffled; cash To donate: (773) 983-4718, <a href="mailto:crash19657@yahoo.com">crash19657@yahoo.com</a> or <a href="mailto:whaleyj5@comcast.net">whaleyj5@comcast.net</a>

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