Reese Gallinaro is a 16-year-old Long Beach High School junior. She takes the typical classes and is involved in clubs with her classmates, but her story is anything but typical.
A few days after her fourth birthday, Gallinaro was diagnosed with leukemia. She doesn’t remember much of the treatment, aside from going to Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center in Manhattan with her father, Joe. She recalls coloring and drawing while there, always doing something with her hands.
“It’s so interesting,” Reese’s mother, Joanna, said. “As she’s saying that she doesn’t remember much, I’m like, wow, great, because it was certainly not easy to watch. Her treatment was pretty rough.”
Reese was treated over the course of about two years, and missed all of pre-kindergarten. She took a chemotherapy drug every day, and it proved effective. She became healthy again, and resumed a normal childhood.
Then, when she was 9, she relapsed.
Her treatment the second time around was even more difficult, with stronger chemotherapy, and the family nearly took up residency at Memorial Sloan Kettering for months in 2017. The drives back and forth from Long Beach to Manhattan took a toll on everyone. Reese missed all of fourth grade, but the school district provided a tutor for her fifth grade year, and she managed to attend school sporadically. Through it all, she stayed strong.
“It was really, really hard,” her mother said, “but Reese always showed much courage and bravery. You sit in the waiting room and you see other patients being treated, and other families going through similar things, and everyone is super courageous, and you try and remain positive. You put one foot in front of the other and do what you have to do.”
Reese loves art, and creating and building things. When she was about 6, before her relapse, her grandmother gave her a set of Legos, and she fell in love with the plastic bricks. “I remember being so happy because I felt independent,” she said, “doing and building something on my own.”
Her second period of treatment dragged on for about two years. Though she was at home for some of it, she also spent weeks, and even months, at a time in the hospital. That took a toll on her energy, and she couldn’t visit with other kids because her immune system was vulnerable.
Spending a lot of time alone, she built all sorts of Lego creations, some based on television shows and movies like “Friends” and the Harry Potter series, and some modeled after houses and buildings. Legos offered her an escape.
They played such an important role in her recovery, it turned out, that she thought they could help others, too.
“Right when I finished treatment, I knew I needed to do something,” she said, “because, yes, I left the hospital, but all these familiar faces that I saw when I went into treatment — my mind was still with them. Because Legos were such a big thing for me, I knew I had to do something with Legos. So we thought of a Lego drive.”
Reese, whose blood has been cancer-free for the last few years, reached out to the school district last fall about collaborating with her, and now she has collection boxes in each elementary school, the middle school and the high school where students and teachers can donate new, unopened Lego sets. There are also boxes at the Bright Eye Beer Co. and in the Long Beach City Hall lobby, each with a scannable QR code so people can connect with Amazon to purchase sets.
The toy drive will run until Feb. 1. So far, nearly 300 Lego sets have been donated, all of them destined for Memorial Sloan Kettering. Reese said that her initiative has moved some current patients to reach out to her to share their stories and thank her for what she is doing.
“I feel like that’s been the most impactful for me,” she said. “When you’re a kid, you don’t have the life experience to know that other people go through the same things you go through. I would just have liked as a kid to see someone else on the other side of it, to know that, you know, I can do this. That I’m physically capable and mentally capable of beating this.”
Last December, the Long Beach City Council heard about Reese’s initiative, and met with her to thank her for her efforts. Council members said they marveled at her initiative, but Joanna Gallinaro said she is not at all surprised by what her daughter is doing.
“Right after treatment, she expressed the idea of wanting and trying to find a way to give back and help kids that were in her situation or a similar situation,” Joanna said. “So when she came up with the idea of being able to somehow give or donate Legos back to children that are still undergoing treatment, it didn’t surprise me at all.”
Reese is now active in school and extracurricular activities. She has been a member of a few clubs, took part in “Names Not Numbers,” in which she and classmates made a documentary about Holocaust survivors, and last year she helped with an apparel fundraiser for those impacted by the wildfires in Maui.
She is also a co-captain of the Leukemia & Lymphoma Society’s Student Visionary campaign, and has been a team member since her freshman year, when she was recognized for raising the most amount of money out of the group’s members.
Now, as she approaches her senior year and her potential post-graduation career choices, Reese is thinking about studying architecture, an interest no doubt sparked by Legos.