Let's all become part of the solution...

My name is Uschi Keszler. I am an Olympian and Olympic coach for figure skating and two time cancer survivor.

I was fortunate to have Dr. Czerniecki of the University of Pennsylvania as my oncology surgeon.

When I first met him after my diagnoses 3 ½ years ago , I said “ I will do anything you ask me to as long as it will not kill my immune-system” At the time we were facing the bird-flu and I was not going to face it with an immune-system that was shut down.

1 ½ years ago Pam Keon from Penn contacted me with info on his research. He wanted to meet with me, because I was so adamant about the immune system. I did not qualify for the trial he was conducting at the time. But now new trials are on the way…

As it turned out , they were running out of funds.

It is not easy to start a new foundation especially for breast cancer. Being involved in elite athletics all my life, reaching goals is what drives me.

We are getting ready for the 2010 Olympics. We need a united effort to win this race against cancer. When JFK vowed we will be on the moon in 10 years, it started an all out effort to reach this goal and we beat it by 1 ½ years…

Since this is a problem that affects all of us we all need to get together to become part of the solution.

One of the trials costs $ 1.5 a year for 5 years. If 15 Million people just 5% of the US population give us just 1 penny a month we could finance this one trial.

I equated pennies into distance.

1 penny = ¾ of an inch

16 pennies = 1 foot

48 pennies = 1 yard

84 480 pennies = 1 mile ($845)

$ 1.5 Million = 1776 miles

It seemed ironic to me that it equated to such an important number to Philadelphia and the United States.

If 300 Million people 5% of the world population would donate a penny a day for one year, we would have 1 Billion 95 million dollars.

We must stop the human suffering and we must win this race.

I founded Pennies in Action™ when I realized that the very people that are our hope to solve this horrible disease have to spend so much of their time on trying to get funding instead of spending that valuable time on research and development. It occurred to me, what if top athletes would have to spend so much time on raising funds for training instead of actually training. By the time they would get to train they would be much too tired to produce a gold medal worthy performance.

But we do expect that from our doctors and researchers.
Please check my web-site www.penniesinaction.org and please help...