photo by Leslie Cantu

A typical seven-year-old, Chase Ringler is more interested in playing games than sitting and talking about his cancer.

Chase Ringler recently celebrated his seventh birthday. He got “nothing,” he claimed – too soon after Christmas. But his parents got another year with their child, and that’s not nothing, not after the all-out brawl with a deadly childhood cancer that struck when Chase was three years old.

Chase is now living a mostly normal life, but he isn’t completely out of the woods. His cancer, neuroblastoma, carries a 75 percent relapse rate, said his mother, Whitney Ringler of Summerville. The doctors say that once a patient reaches five years without treatment, it’s unlikely a relapse will occur, she said.

Chase’s five-year countdown started in July 2009.

In the meantime, Ringler has funneled her energy into starting a nonprofit organization, Chase After a Cure, that raises money to fund a research lab at MUSC.

The group is having its third gala event Saturday at the Charleston Marriott. The first two galas raised $100,000, Ringler said. Now she hopes to raise that much in one night.

Unlike many other charities, Ringler said, this one is completely local. All money will go to pediatric cancer research at MUSC, led by Dr. Jackie Kraveka.

It’s actually possible to go to the lab and see what one’s money has bought, to look through a microscope at the cancer cells that are being studied, Ringler said.

The hope is to find a better way to treat the cancer. Neuroblastoma is a cancer of the nervous system. It’s known as a “sleeping cancer,” because it usually grows quietly and isn’t discovered until it’s metastasized.

When Chase was diagnosed, the cancer was already a Stage 4, and he was given a 30 percent chance of survival, Ringler said.

What followed was an aggressive course of treatment: surgery, high-dose chemotheraphy, radiation, a bone marrow transplant and immunotherapy.

The treatment successfully rid his body of the cancer cells, but it wasn’t without cost. He lost a kidney during surgery, he now wears hearing aids because of the chemotherapy, his mother worries that his healthy cells might show damage in the future from the chemotherapy, and he probably won’t be able to have children of his own.

Because of the myriad side effects, Ringler hopes that researchers can come up with a better treatment.

Unfortunately, neuroblastoma is an “orphan cancer,” according the group’s website – there aren’t enough people with this cancer to make research profitable for pharmaceutical companies, making Chase After a Cure’s fundraising especially important.

So Ringler simultaneously worries about Chase, and her older daughter Erica, and plans for events like this. Her dining room has become planning central, filled with the items that will be auctioned off in the live and silent auctions on Saturday.

This, she said, is the new normal.

“We’re a cancer family now,” she said.

Tickets for the gala can be purchased at www.chaseafteracure.com or at the door. A $75 ticket includes dinner, open bar and live music.

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