`Ricky`s going to die, but we`re going to give him the best care we can,” Mila Pierce told Ricky`s parents, Richard and Judy Socha of Addison, as she held their hands tightly.
Their oldest son was only 5 years old that hot summer of 1971 when Judy saw bruises on his body. Pierce, a renowned pediatric hematologist, was giving them Ricky`s prognosis; he had leukemia. The survival rate for his cancer of the white blood cells was very low in 1971.
Judy Socha has a faraway look in her eyes as she calmly tells this story over a cup of coffee in her well-worn kitchen. ”We felt so vulnerable. We asked what we could do. She told us we could pray, and we were going to need a lot of blood.” For each pint of blood Ricky would be given, three replacement pints were required by the blood banks.
Having never given blood herself, Socha was not sure she could ask others to help. But when her neighbor, Barbara Herman, asked what she could do for Ricky, Socha told her what Mila Pierce had said. Herman called the Red Cross to find out how to hold a blood drive at their church, St. Philips. That first blood drive brought in 112 pints of blood; it was repeated every year until 1976 when Ricky died.
As it turned out, Ricky`s treatment actually required only a few pints of blood. But Judy Socha has never stopped asking others to give blood (she has given more than five gallons herself and hopes to be a candidate for a blood marrow donor program); since Ricky`s death she has acted as chairwoman of Addison`s village blood project. And on Oct. 25, 1989, she received the American Association of Blood Banks` national award for outstanding recruiting.
Socha and Herman had approached the village and asked if they could make local churches` sporadic individual blood drives a community effort, to ensure a steady supply of blood. Today six scheduled blood drives a year, including two at the high schools, involve every community organization. Emergency drives are held when necessary. With a budget of only $1,000 a year, the eight members of the village`s blood committee plan and run each drive under Socha`s direction.
She has also played a big part in persuading the chief executive officers of 50 Chicago corporations to begin or expand their employee blood-donor programs to alleviate the Chicago area`s chronic shortage.
The Socha family lives in the three-bedroom split-level they bought 22 years ago. Raising six surviving children on her husband`s income from his ground crew job with United Airlines would not seem to leave much time or money for helping others, but Judy Socha has set priorities in her life. She is the person others depend on: to help out at her children`s school, to serve as the scout leader, to make the play costumes, to teach catechism, and, most of all, to make sure a there`s a dependable blood supply.
That she has been able to help so many people amazes even her.
When Ricky became ill, Socha was pregnant with her sixth child. For the last three years of his life Ricky was completely paralyzed from the effects of chemotherapy. The doctors` suggestions that he be institutionalized still bother Socha today. Instead the Sochas set up a hospital bed in their living room to nurse him themselves.
During Ricky`s illness, Judy Socha found she couldn`t ignore what she was learning about the need for blood.
”I never knew the world existed. I never knew what the hospital was,”
she says today. During Ricky`s illness she became close to other parents whose children were being treated for leukemia at Children`s Memorial Hospital in Chicago, and began helping when she could.
”We saw over a hundred children die, one of them after only 13 days,”
Socha says. ”It was a horrible thing.”
She watched a father beg for blood donors one Christmas Eve when the hospital ran out of platelets. His little girl died the next day in spite of the eight donors Socha found to match her blood type.
She saw a doctor grieve because his patient`s family lacked the money to fly her to Seattle, where a matched bone marrow transplant could be made. Richard Socha found a way to get her there.
After Ricky died, his parents worked at Ronald McDonald House near Children`s Memorial Hospital in Chicago, which was being set up to provide homey lodging for young cancer patients` families during their treatment, but Judy Socha found her family needed her (”When my kids get older I`ll go back down there,” she says), and Addison`s blood program needed her.
LifeSource, a not-for-profit cooperative venture of the American Red Cross and the Blood Center of Illinois, is Illinois` largest blood bank. Its staff handles the actual drawing and processing of donated blood and distributes it to nearly 60 hospitals in the Chicago area. Susan B. Stuttle is LifeSource`s managing director of donor services.
”I`ve known Judy Socha for seven years, and since I`ve met her I`m a better person,” Stuttle said. ”She just does everything for the blood drives. She even bakes cookies.”
”You can help three or four people with each pint of blood,” Socha says. ”New blood was probably donated four or five days ago. Platelets die in 24 hours. The turnover of blood is phenomenal. We make a goal of 100-120 pints of blood for each drive. I can honestly say we have never fallen below 90 percent of our goal. We don`t live by failure; we never say, `Oh well, that`s the way it goes.`
”Often programs begin with great steam and then fizzle, but this year we`ve collected more than ever. Last January (1989), there was a real crisis for blood. We held a special drive and collected 79 pints.” Socha keeps a list of people who have asked to be called when there is an acute shortage.
To ensure success, the drives are scheduled a year in advance. Four weeks before each drive Socha meets with each drive chairman. She contacts LifeSource to set up the drive.
Her committee blitzes the area with publicity. The members send news releases to the local papers and radio and television stations; Socha follows them up with phone calls. She redecorates the posters LifeSource supplies and posts them all over town.
Socha meets with the sponsoring organization`s volunteers and trains them for what to expect, and she stays on site throughout the day getting donor information and making sure the drive is running smoothly.
People often turn to Socha in times of crisis. ”People need someone to talk to,” Socha says. ”They know I`ve lost a son, so they know I`ve been there. I can give them the emotional support they need. A woman will tell me her husband is dying and she doesn`t know what to do. I tell her just to tell him you love him. It`s good to be able to tell people it will get better, and it does, if you can turn around the bad.”
LifeSource was able to capitalize on Socha`s ability to talk to others in 1988. Richard L. Thomas, president of First Chicago Corporation, found through his board membership with Rush-Presbyterian-St. Luke`s hospital that the blood supply was at a critical level. He scheduled a breakfast meeting for 50 chief executive officers to discuss the importance of corporate blood donor programs. Three people spoke at this meeting: Thomas; Wilbur H. Gantz, president of Baxter Healthcare Corp.; and Judy Socha.
”It was Judy`s story that really turned the CEO`s around,” said Jim Gabel, one of LifeSource`s directors. ”It hit home and it hit hard.” The results were astonishing: Participating companies, including Baxter, Abbott Laboratories, Allstate and McDonald`s, had increases from 28 to 50 percent.
After hearing her at the breakfast meeting, the president of Abbott asked if she would come to speak directly to the employees. ”Abbott videotaped her,” Gabel said. The result is a moving, persuasive piece. ”She did it in one take. LifeSource had copies made so our consultants can use it when they recruit groups.
Perhaps it`s not fair to ask what she might be like today if Ricky had lived. Would she have become the same person? Would she have accomplished so much?
Judy Socha doesn`t know, but she says quietly of her work, ”Look at what one little boy`s suffering was able to achieve.”
