Inspirational Stories

Kim Spancake and her husband, Drew Snider, understand the crucial importance of health care workers. When their 13-year-old daughter, Addie, was born, she was eight weeks early and only weighed two pounds, seven ounces. Addie spent six weeks at the Duke Regional Special Care Nursery (SCN), growing stronger and healthier under the care of the team there.

On May 1, 2020, MIX 101.5 WRAL-FM hosted an on-air fundraiser and teamed up with local businesses 919-Fix-MyAC and The Carolina Ale House of Durham to bring 160 lunches to healthcare providers at Duke Children's.

Steve and Lisa Eisenstein, P’19, P’22, are no strangers to supporting good causes—and not just by opening their wallets. They are active in various philanthropic organizations, including one that helps people rebuild homes after hurricanes and other natural disasters.

When COVID-19 arrived on American shores and exploded across the country within a matter of weeks, researchers across Duke hastened into action. Duke scientists in fields from microbiology and molecular genetics to pediatrics and surgery are racing to try to understand this exceptionally complex virus and develop approaches to defeat it.

When facing an illness such as ALS, one in which there currently is no proven treatment to stop or reverse it, patients often look to clinical trials for options for living longer and better lives.

As teams throughout Duke’s hospitals, clinics, and research labs actively monitor and respond to the developing COVID-19 pandemic, Duke Health’s COVID-19 Response Fund to support the area of greatest need has received a generous gift from the Biogen Foundation.

Dr. Kristin Schroeder and her team in the Duke Global Health Institute have been working in Mwanza, Tanzania, to improve outcomes for children with cancer. They are finding that success is not always a matter of resources or equipment, but in finding creative ways to overcome the roadblocks that keep families from accessing cancer care.

Haller, of Fort Lauderdale, Florida, says the journey leading up to and after her adult daughter’s kidney transplant in 2017 was at times difficult—from being on dialysis to waiting for a donor, to learning to adjust to life after the transplant.

Breast cancer survivor Monica Crooks is coming up on 5 years cancer free, and she wants donors to the Duke Cancer Institute know that she couldn't have done it without them!

Duke’s lung transplant team brought Gavin Maitland back from the brink of death. Now he’s raising money to help the program save more lives.