Cypress ‘cancer mom’ wins Woman of the Year
The last line of Stephanie Carroll’s Woman of the Year speech poignantly summarized her winning fundraising campaign. “There is only one thing more relentless than cancer: mothers.”
Stephanie, a 30-year-old mother of four daughters who is expecting her fifth child — a son — with husband David Carroll in November, raised a record-breaking $291,000 over 10 weeks for the Leukemia & Lymphoma Society. That’s more than any other Man & Woman of the Year candidate in the Texas Gulf Coast chapter’s history.
Earlier this month, the organization announced during its 2017 Grand Finale gala that Stephanie and the 15 additional participants wrangled $1.1 million in total — shattering the $1 million record set at last year’s fete. Man of the Year winner Scott Gildea lassoed an impressive $103,000.
How did the self-described “stay-at-home mom in suburbia” pull it off?
“It was the power of Facebook and people caring,” she says. “I had my neighbors and best friends here in Longwood, about 15 women, throw tennis tournaments, corn-hole tournaments and bean-bag tosses. They really spread the word out in Cypress.”
More than 90 percent of her funds raised, however, trickled in from online donations across the country — even one from Australia — in honor of her third-youngest, Drew Carroll, who got a leukemia diagnosis at age 3½.
“She would come in and say, ‘Mommy, my head hurts,’ ” Stephanie recalls. Doctors had misdiagnosed her daughter’s condition as strep throat and severe allergies.
“Drew looked up at me and had blood in the bottom of her eye; they said she’d broken a blood vessel from rubbing them too hard. We were going out of town when I told my husband I had to take her in one more time.”
Nurses suspected that Drew might have leukemia after a complete blood-count test. Stephanie says she’ll never forget when they ran into the room and said, “You can either take an ambulance or drive yourself to Texas Children’s Hospital.”
In August 2016, Drew rang the end-of-radiation-treatment bell.
A mother that Stephanie met during Drew’s chemotherapy, Amy Lejeune, sat at one of the Carrolls’ seven gala tables at the River Oaks Country Club. Amy’s daughter, Paige Lejuene, lost her cancer battle last October; she was 16 years old.
“For every $50,000 raised, you get naming rights of a research grant, so that was my goal,” Stephanie explains. “The first person that we raised $50,000 for was Paige. At $100,000 we did Drew, and at $150,000 we did Rhett Steiger. He’s 6, the same age as Drew.”
She was able to name six grants after children who’d battled cancer. Rhett’s mom, Sylvia Steiger, also attended the black-tie bash.
Stephanie says her research showed that the National Cancer Institute allots only 4 percent of its $4.9 billion budget to childhood cancer research. So, she named her fundraising campaign “More Than Four.”
“Momcology,” an online community of mothers with children with cancer, rallied behind her. More than 70 supporters applauded Stephanie’s win and heartfelt remarks at the annual gala chaired by Woman of the Year 2016 Katie Daily and her husband, John Daily.
“I think every parent in this room can agree that you would rather die yourself than watch your child die,” she said, addressing the sold-out ballroom. “I don’t know how we are going to do it, but I know in our lifetime, we will see our kids getting more than 4 percent.”