At Woodbury dinner, a father celebrates life, with help from his son

When Michael Labella learned he could help keep his dad cancer-free through a bone marrow transplant, the father of five did not hesitate to undergo the eight-hour procedure.

"When I was getting tested, I actually could not wait to be the donor," Labella, 40, of Massapequa, said Tuesday evening.

Seated next to him at an event in Woodbury celebrating the ongoing lives of leukemia survivors was his father, Joseph Labella.

"This is why I was put here on Earth and this is what we’re going to do together," Michael Labella said. "This is what we do. We’re Labellas."

About 10 months after the transplant, the healthy duo and their relatives sat among several other leukemia survivors and their donors at the Don Monti Memorial Research Foundation’s annual "celebration of life" event at Crest Hollow Country Club. Each year, the venue owned by the Monti family welcomes bone marrow recipients as well as their donors, families and doctors to celebrate their lives, and in the case of the Labellas, each other.

"I was very grateful," Joseph Labella said of his son's donation. "You always think that your family loves you and cares about you, but when they’re willing to sacrifice the way that they all did ... you feel very special, very fortunate."

In July 2024, Labella, 67, of Amityville, was diagnosed with acute myeloid leukemia, a common and "serious" cancer of blood and bone marrow, said Dr. Samer Al-Homsi, the system chief of blood and marrow transplant and cellular therapy at Northwell Health Cancer Institute. The bone marrow is "invaded" by cancer cells and "stops making normal blood cells," causing fatigue and inhibited ability to fight infection, Al-Homsi said.

After several rounds of chemotherapy, Joseph Labella said he was sent home to recover last September. Although in remission and feeling well, Al-Homsi said there was a 70% chance Labella's cancer, the most common form of acute leukemia in adults, would return within a year. Those chances drop to 20% for the first year following a transplant and diminish. A patient could be considered cured after two years in remission, the doctor added.

Thanks to advancements in medicine dating back two decades, bone marrow transplants are most commonly performed as generally "painless" blood transfusions, Al-Homsi said. It’s rare that doctors "have to dig into the bone marrow and suction these cells," as was essential in the previous century.

Doctors gave Michael Labella a drug to self-inject into his abdomen in the week leading up to the procedure. The injections extracted stem cells from the bone marrow in which they reside and allowed them to circulate in his blood. On the day of the procedure, whole blood was extracted from Labella, his stem cells were separated, and the remaining content was returned to his body.

The procedure was "unbelievably easier than I thought it was going to be," he said.

Tuesday’s invitation-only, free event honored Don Monti, who died of myeloblastic leukemia at age 16 in 1972 and whose name adorns the bone marrow transplant center at North Shore University Hospital. The foundation his parents started and his sister, Caroline Monti Saladino, and her children and grandchildren run in his name has since raised tens of millions of dollars to bolster cancer research and patient care.

It’s much more common that bone marrow recipients and donors meet for the first time at this event, Saladino said.

"Most of the time when we do this yearly, donors are coming from Italy, from Puerto Rico," said Saladino, 80, of Cold Spring Harbor.