LI teen who beat cancer twice used Lego to power through now shes helping other kids do the same
She’s building some good in the world.A Long Island teen cancer survivor is delivering some joy and positive strength to kids fighting similar illnesses with a Lego drive with hundreds of donated toys.“Some days, it was hard just to sit up.Playing with Lego motivated me to actually do something throughout the day,” Lido Beach resident Reese Gallinaro,16, said of her two fights with Leukemia.
“Such a big part of treatment is getting up instead of lying in bed all day — there’s just not many things that are motivating, but Lego was one of them.”Gallinaro was treated at Memorial Sloan Kettering the first time when she was just 4 years old, and then again during an unfortunate relapse from when she was 9 until 11.“It really became an escape for her the second time,” Reese’s mother, Joanna Gallinaro, 43, said.“If she would say something like ‘my arm hurts,’ I would just hand her another bag.”The second stint involved much more aggressive treatment that fatigued the young fighter significantly more than the previous bout.
On top of that, she had to miss nearly her entire fourth-grade year while at Memorial Sloan Kettering.“I was immunocompromised so I was in isolation a lot, my friends were really just my nurses and family.So I needed to keep myself occupied a lot,” Gallinaro said.
“I must have built at least 50 sets.I love ‘Harry Potter,’ so I would put on one of the movies as I built my big Hogwarts Castle.
It made such a difference for me.”Now, as a high school junior who has been cancer-free for close to six years, she wants to pay it forward.At the end of 2024, Gallinaro organized a Lego drive for Memorial Sloan Kettering’s children, which is being collected at all Long Beach schools, City Hall and the nearby Bright Eye Beer Co.“After I was finally able to comprehend that I’m safe, the first thing I thought about was all the other kids in the hospital,” Gallinaro, who has helped raise thousands in the past for cance...