Former Tupper Lake resident raises $250,000 to battle cancer, help victims

A check for $20,000 was recently donated to the American Cancer Society. Pictured, from left, were James Flynn, Move for the Movement Event Coordinator, Rose Flynn, Move for the Movement Event Director, Louise Santosuosso, American Cancer Society vice president, Boston/New England and Allison Mannette, American Cancer Society Senior Development Manager. (photo provided)

By Rich Rosentreter

Former Tupper Laker Rose Leonard-Flynn is a cancer survivor and over the course of several years has raised approximately $250,000 on her crusade to help fund research to find a cure for the deadly disease and provide aid to its victims.

Rose currently resides in Massachusetts with her husband James, but she was born and raised in Tupper Lake. She moved away in 1985. Her sister Kim Henning and brother Ted Leonard still live in the village and her mother, Donna Exware, lives in Potsdam.

In May 2011 at the age of 44, Rose was diagnosed with stage 3 breast cancer, and she is doing well now and technically considered a survivor. She recently discussed her bout with cancer and how it inspired her and James to begin their fundraising campaign.

Getting the news

Bad news is difficult to handle, but none worse than hearing the dreaded words: “You have cancer!”

When Rose received the news, she said it hit her hard.

“It was devastating” she said, adding that her daughters were in their early teens at the time, the youngest still in middle school the other in high school. “I was a full-time mom. It was scary because you never want to hear those three words and you automatically think it’s a death sentence.”

She said she was fortunate to have support from her family and friends who rallied around her in a time of crisis.

“Everyone seemed to just come and become part a part of our life and just picked up what we couldn’t do. They say it takes a village and it really took a village for us to get through the first six months to a year,” she said.

During the first six years after being diagnosed with cancer, Rose had nine surgeries.

“It was a tough six years,” she said. Eventually, after years of radiation and other treatments, Rose gradually began to feel better as her condition lightened up a bit and a certain degree of hope settled in.

“It’s hard to pinpoint a specific time. I had a very radical treatment,” she said. “When I hit five years, I think it was OK, it’s not in my face and I’m still here. I’m surviving and I’m moving forward. I had other things to focus on. I decided early on in my treatment that I wanted to fight back and that’s when we started our fundraiser and became a huge thing for us to focus on – and the Relay for Life and American Cancer Society, that became our goal, to find a cure.”

That was in 2013.

“That’s when we started. It wasn’t a black mark in our lives, it became something that we celebrated and we focused on trying to make it hope and something that wasn’t awful,” Rose said, adding that she and James did their best to make a positive out of a negative situation.

“We took the focus off of us and put it on other people who were diagnosed and we needed to raise money to help those people and also for the future too,” James said, adding that they both realized it wasn’t just them facing the challenges of cancer.

“When you think about it, and it seems like a sad statement, but nowadays it seems like almost everyone knows somebody who either has cancer or gone through cancer or knows somebody who has died of cancer. So there’s a lot unfortunately,” he said.

Despite all the hope, there is always a chance that cancer will again appear.

“There’s always going to be that cloud; there will always be that fear,” Rose said.

“Every time she feels a little bump somewhere, it goes through her mind that ‘Oh crap, it’s back.’ Even though it may not be, she thinks that. It will always be with her,” James said.

Fundraising

Rose said her first experience getting involved in fundraising for cancer came by participating in the Relay for Life with her team called “Rosie’s Riveters.” But that was just the start.

“We decided we needed to do a fundraiser, so we decided to do a dance fundraiser where we would invite dance studios to being their upper echelon dancers to come and perform,” she said.

That dance event came to be known as Move to the Movement and since its inception has grown to six shows in Massachusetts in which an average of 1,800 to 2,000 dancers cross the stage, with a total of nearly 3,000 people in the audience, according to James. This year was the event’s tenth anniversary.

“The first year we did it we raised $5,000 and it was so exciting. We had so much fun!” Rose said. “So next year, when we hold Move for the Movement again, will be the eleventh year. We will have raised almost $250,000. That’s what we have handed over to the Cancer Society. This year we held it during the pandemic so it was a bit challenging and we still raised $35,000.”

According to Rose, she and James recently presented a $20,000 check to the American Cancer Society, and this year the monies went to transportation for cancer patients, something she said North Country residents are familiar with.

“I know in Tupper Lake they have a van that transports patients to Plattsburgh for radiation. My sister utilized that transportation and it was a Godsend. Even here where I live in the city, people don’t go for treatments because they don’t have transportation and we were able to designate that our $20,000 this year is going directly to help transporting cancer patients to the hospital for that treatment,” she said.

According to James, the program sponsored by the ACS is called “Road to Recovery.”

“In the past years the money we raised has gone into the general fund of Relay for Life and left it up to them as to where the money should be used, but this year we felt strongly that we wanted the money we raised to go to a specific benefit for people and also to our local community here in Massachusetts,” he said.

Helping others

The shift from cancer victim to cancer-related fundraising has provided Rose and James with a mission and sense of purpose that did not come overnight. Rose said she is happy that she is a 10-year survivor, but the memories of the battle she fought are still fresh in her mind and fuel her enthusiasm to keep raising money to help those currently going through what she endured.

“I guess when I was first diagnosed, I felt that I was too young. I had so much more to give and I wasn’t ready to quit. As the days went by and it sunk in more and more, I had more and more people that came around me and said ‘You can do this; you’re the strongest person I know. You’re a fighter. This will not take you down.’ And those words, when you hear them over and over again, no matter what spot you’re in, you tend to believe them. I have many friends who have had many horrible things happen in their life and I’ve always turned around to help them and then I finally received it back,” Rose said, adding that she just celebrated her 55th birthday. “I don’t feel like a victim anymore. I definitely feel that I have been given a reason to live and I am going to take every day and embrace it and move forward and do what I can do just to make someone else’s life easier.”

And support for Rose still continues as well.

“My sister was diagnosed too. She is doing fantastic. She supports me, she travels for six hours and comes and volunteers at Move for the Movement. My nephew Timothy Fuller always made me smile. He shaved his head and put a pink ribbon on his head for me as support. He was a big supporter too. My brother Ted does fishing derbies and raises money for the relay team,” Rose said. “My mom and her husband hold paint nights. She sells ribbons and peanut brittle that she makes. She is a huge supporter for our fundraisers as well.”

These days, the fundraising efforts takes a good amount of time and energy. Move for the Movement takes roughly nine months to do between organizing, planning and getting it to happen, and the neighborhood Rosebud Relay, an event organized to replace the Relay for Life because it was canceled the past two years due to the pandemic, was held in May and Rose and the team walked 24 hours straight for a total of roughly 40 miles.

Rose said both events continue to grow and those two things keep her and James busy enough, even with a crew of volunteers who help out. With the success of their fundraisers and the efforts of organizations such as the American Cancer Society, they say there is hope in the battle against cancer.

“As much as we hear about people that succumb to cancer, there are just as many success stories and there has been so much new treatments that as little as ten to fifteen years ago, didn’t exist and people are surviving because of those treatments or procedures,” James said. “It’s encouraging and that’s part of the reason we try to raise as much money as possible to help research for those types of things and hopefully it will save more lives.”

Rose also had a message to others battling cancer.

“If I would have gotten my diagnosis in the early 1980s, it was a death sentence. Stage 3 breast cancer was a death sentence. In 2011, it was something that could not be cured, but could be helped – and I got 11 more years out of that,” Rose said. “If I can say anything, it’s don’t give up. Believe, keep fighting.”

“And if someone asks them to donate money to help fund research for cancer, donate. Don’t brush them off, because they may not think that $10 or $20 doesn’t make a difference, but it actually does in the long run,” James added.

The best way people can help is to make a donation online at move4tm.org. They can also get more information about the couple’s fundraisers on their social media outlets on Instagram, Facebook and soon to be on Tik Tok.