In 2017, 96-year-old Mary Armington took a trip from her home in Florida to Astoria to visit her son, Dr. William Armington. As a radiologist at the time at Columbia Memorial Hospital, Dr. Armington had diagnosed cancer in hundreds of patients, some of whom had delayed getting care because of financial hardships.
So Mary decided to help by donating $50,000 to start a fund for cancer patients in the North Coast region to pay for expenses like transportation, utility bills, lodging and rent. Nine years later, the Arm-in-Arm Fund has nearly tripled in size and has given grants to dozens of patients at the CMH-OHSU Knight Cancer Collaborative in Astoria.
This year, the Columbia Memorial Hospital Foundation increased to $2,000 the grant money a team of social workers can award to an individual to help them, for example, replace a broken refrigerator or repair a home furnace. Money from the fund has also been used to provide Thanksgiving and Christmas holiday meals for patients and their families. Joining us to discuss the fund and its impact are Mary Armington and William Armington, who is now retired and has also donated to the fund. Mark Kujala, foundation director of Columbia Memorial Hospital also joins us.
Note: The following transcript was transcribed digitally and validated for accuracy, readability and formatting by an OPB volunteer.
Dave Miller: This is Think Out Loud on OPB. I’m Dave Miller. In 2017, 96-year-old Mary Armington took a trip from her home in Florida to visit her son, William Armington in Astoria. William, who has since retired, was a radiologist at Columbia Memorial Hospital. He had diagnosed cancer in hundreds of patients. Some of them had delayed care because of financial hardships.
Mary decided to help by donating $50,000 to start a fund for cancer patients in the North Coast region. It was called the Arm-in-Arm Fund. It paid for non-medical expenses like transportation, utility bills, lodging and rent. Nine years later, the fund has nearly tripled in size and has given grants to about 100 patients.
Mary is now 104 years old. She, her son William, and Mark Kujala, the executive director of the Columbia Memorial Hospital Foundation, all join me now. It’s great to have you on Think Out Loud.
Mark Kujala: Happy to be here.
William Armington: Hello.
Mary Armington: Thank you.
Miller: Mary, I want to start with you. What made you want to donate your own money to create this cancer fund?
M. Armington: You mean in Astoria?
Miller: Exactly.
M. Armington: It goes back to State College, Pennsylvania, where I was attending church, and they sent me out to visit a woman out in the outskirts. I went to visit her, and while I was there, she said she had cancer. I became interested, and she said, “let me show you.” So she showed me her left breast that was practically eaten by cancer at the time.
I was so taken aback with that, that when I went out to visit Bill in Astoria, I knew that area, in the outskirts of Astoria, was kind of a poor area. I was quite certain that we would find cancer patients there who were not able to reach the program to get treatment.
Miller: Bill, let me turn to you. You worked as a radiologist at Columbia Memorial Hospital in Astoria. How much of your clinical work was with cancer patients?
W. Armington: I’d say approximately 20-25% of the cases that I dealt with. We’re also dealing with cancer in some form or another, either early in diagnosis or stable after some sort of intervention, or in the last throes of the disease. So I got to see cancer in multiple phases and then cancers associated with other disease processes.
Miller: And was your mom right? Was Mary right that there were financial struggles among your patients that were getting in the way of their care?
W. Armington: Unfortunately, she was absolutely right. And as a consequence, many of the early diagnoses of cancer that I made, were in late stage. Patients would develop a lump here or there and didn’t think anything of it. [They] didn’t want to go to the doctor, couldn’t afford to go to the doctor, and consequently, the cancer would progress. And when I would see the patient, the cancer would have spread from the original site to other multiple locations, having metastasized. And that was almost always due to the lack of finances, to allow them to take time off from their job or away from childcare to come in and be diagnosed.
Miller: This is an important point because cancer care itself could be unbelievably expensive, whether it’s surgery, chemo, radiation, diagnostics. But you’re not even talking about that part. You’re talking about incidental costs, say like travel or time away from work?
W. Armington: Yeah. It’s true. The major safety nets – Medicare, Medicaid, different insurance companies – will cover the bulk of cancer care itself. But it’s the impediments that keep the patients from getting in to get that cancer care that can be sometimes less than $50. And that keeps them from getting the treatment that they receive. They just can’t come up with the $50, because to them, that is a large amount of money. So what mom is talking about is having monies available to help patients to overcome those very simple things that keep them from accessing the majority of their cancer care.
Miller: Mary, it’s one thing to say, based on, as you were noting, your personal experience with a woman in Pennsylvania and your assumption that there was a need where your son was practicing medicine … It’s one thing to say there is this need here. It’s another to say, I’m going to spend my own money to do something about it. Why did you want to do that?
M. Armington: I’m not wealthy, but I had some extra money. And thinking of this woman in Pennsylvania, that really bothered me. And then being in Astoria and seeing the outskirts of Astoria, I knew there were people there that probably would be having problems with cancer and they would say, “well, I can’t afford to go anywhere to get treatment, so I’ll just let it go.”
Miller: And as you say, you had some money that you didn’t need and there were people who you thought could use it.
M. Armington: Well, I had some money I could have used myself, but I thought this was more important.
Miller: And that’s why you did it.
As I noted, Mark Kujala is with us as well, the executive director of the Columbia Memorial Hospital Foundation, which now manages this fund. Mark, the fund started giving out money in 2019 after a couple of years of getting all the various financial ducks in a row. Was there any sort of similar safety net for people to pay for general life expenses, while getting cancer treatment, before this Arm-in-Arm Fund was created?
Kujala: No, this is really unique, and it came on at the same time as the CMH-OHSU Knight Cancer Collaborative was established here at Columbia Memorial Hospital. So, we had just built a new cancer center, and as Dr. Armington said, we were seeing a real need in the community. We have great social workers who work at the Cancer Center and so they are able to link up with local nonprofits and assist folks, when they are in need. But oftentimes, folks just aren’t eligible or they need the money faster than what can be provided, and that’s where the Arm-in-Arm Fund has come in.
Since 2019, the Arm-in-Arm Fund has helped about 100 patients with real crucial needs, and most of those are for utility bills, and travel and lodging expenses. These are people that get diagnosed, they have to start treatment right away. They have to take significant time off of work. Sometimes they’re the sole provider for their household. And this can be a huge strain. Again, they’ve also helped in instances beyond just those utility bills, and travel and lodging. They’ve helped with eyeglasses, they’ve helped with nutrition supplements. In one case, the Fund bought a refrigerator for a patient whose refrigerator had gone out and they couldn’t keep their food cold.
It’s just been a huge blessing to so many in the community to have this Fund. I listened to the story Mary was talking about, the breast cancer patient. We actually had an instance where a patient was going through treatment for breast cancer and was really having some mental health struggles. The Fund paid for this patient to go to a camp for breast cancer survivors and to bond with other breast cancer patients. It was a huge benefit to them in their journey and in their effort to heal. These are just a few examples of how the Fund has helped.
Miller: Mary, what’s it like for you to hear that the fund that you started with your own seed money is doing what you hoped it would?
M. Armington: Well, this is exactly what I was hoping would happen, that it would reach the less fortunate people and bring them some stability in their lives.
Miller: Mark, how do you decide who will actually get money from this fund?
Kujala: Well, thankfully, we have social workers who work at the Cancer Center. We have had about 6,000 patients actually come through the Cancer Center since 2017, and they work with each one of those patients and are able to identify those who really have a need. They often connect them with a local nonprofit and are able to satisfy that. But there are cases when they’re just not able to do that. So this is where the Arm-in-Arm Fund comes in. And it’s really the social workers working on the ground with all these patients who say, “hey, you know this might be a good fit for the Arm-and-Arm Fund to help.”
There’s not going to be a resource for everything in the community, although we have a really good network of nonprofits. But things like Thanksgiving dinners or Christmas dinners, people don’t often think about that. If you’re going through cancer treatment and you don’t have enough money to provide a holiday dinner for your family, the Arm-in-Arm Fund has actually done that over the last few years and done it for several families of cancer patients. That’s the kind of thing that the Arm-in-Arm Fund does. And it’s really up to our team of social workers, our team of providers and caregivers here at CMH who are able to match up a patient that has that requirement and the Arm-in-Arm Fund.
Miller: Bill, are there any particular stories that stand out to you, of people who are recipients from this fund?
W. Armington: I can certainly tell you about patients and their difficulties during their cancer treatment. But from my perspective, to know that my mom was generous enough and foresightful enough to create this fund so that, as a clinician, I could know that the patients who I was caring for would be able to get in to see me for the visits where I could provide their care … that gave me a great deal of satisfaction.
Miller: So if people hear that a 99-year-old started a support fund for people with cancer, they might be surprised. But knowing your mom, were you surprised?
W. Armington: No, I really wasn’t. Mom has been a very giving person, throughout her life. I could share instances of her generosity that show you what kind of a person she is. As she mentioned earlier, she’s not a wealthy person. My dad was a college professor and did not make very much money. Nevertheless, for example in 1956 when the Hungarian Revolution occurred, my mom and father took in a Hungarian family who was fleeing from the Russian invasion and put them up in our three-bedroom house, with four children of her own, for over a year. So having been her child, I’ve certainly learned the benefit of giving and looking for opportunities to benefit others.
She’s always been a wonderful role model for me and a symbol of what you can accomplish in life if you look beyond your own necessities and your own desires. And I don’t know if you mentioned, but Mom is now 104. She will be 105 on August 9, and she’s still very interested in helping others. In fact, I think she will tell you that’s why she was put here on Earth.
Miller: Bill, I understand that nearly a decade ago, you and your wife put up the Mary Armington Healing Garden outside the Cancer Center where you worked. Can you tell us about the garden?
W. Armington: It’s a wonderful place for cancer patients to go out, sit and reflect, and visit with loved ones. My wife and I gave a significant gift for the creation of the Cancer Center. And as a consequence, in honor of our gift, the Cancer Center created the Mary Armington Healing Garden, which has trees, flowers, a water feature and a beautiful pottery installation on the wall, in addition [to] a plaque which denotes the space as the Mary Armington Healing Garden with a one-word moniker. The word is “gratitude.”
I think that word embodies my mom. If I’d have to say what my mom is all about in one word, it would be gratitude. She’s very happy to be here and very happy to share what she has with others. And she’s grateful for what she has.
Miller: Mary, how has gratitude shaped your life?
M. Armington: Well, could you rephrase that?
Miller: Yeah, Bill was just saying that when he made this healing garden in your honor, he put one word there, the word gratitude. I’m curious how gratitude has shaped your life?
M. Armington: I think knowing that the garden is there and that people can, after having cancer treatment, go into the garden and reflect. I think that that’s enough.
Miller: What are you grateful for today?
M. Armington: I think probably I’m grateful that the Lord has kept me down here this long to do the things that I love doing, and that is reaching out to help other people that have less than I have.
Miller: One hundred and four years old is a long life. What’s your definition?
M. Armington: You say it’s a long life, but it isn’t. If you turn around, you’re there. I don’t know how I became 104, really.
Miller: What’s your definition of a good life?
M. Armington: I don’t know how to answer that.
Miller: Bill, what about you? I’m curious, maybe based on what you’ve learned from your mom, what’s your definition of a good life?
W. Armington: I would say that a good life is one that you are fully immersed in while you’re living it, looking each day to be as present as possible and as involved outside of yourself as you can be. And that may mean several different things, depending on the circumstances that you find yourself in, but a life, which is lived day to day with some long-range views in place, that perhaps after a period of time, you can look back on and see that you’ve achieved.
For example, staying somewhere is to leave the place better than I found it. And if I can do that in each situation that I find myself in, I’m quite satisfied. If that means having a career where I can look back and see how many patients I’ve helped over time, or if I can say I’ve lived in a house that I left in better shape than when I found it, I’m satisfied. So I think it’s the satisfaction of knowing that, in life, you’ve made a difference. And that obviously may take many forms, but you’ve made a difference for the good.
Miller: Bill, Mary and Mark, thanks very much.
W. Armington: Thank you for having us.
M. Armington: Thank you.
Kujala: Thank you.
Miller: Bill Armington is a retired radiologist who previously worked at Columbia Memorial Hospital in Astoria. His mother, Mary is the founder of the Arm-in-Arm Fund for cancer patients at the hospital. And Mark Kujala is the executive director of the Columbia Memorial Hospital Foundation.
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