Waterford ― Launched in the wake of the Great Recession, it turned out to be a fundraising effort for the ages.

Lawrence + Memorial Hospital’s campaign to fund construction of a cancer hospital that would serve patients throughout southeastern Connecticut seemed ambitious at the time. In retrospect, it seems audacious, say some who still marvel at the product of its success: Smilow Cancer Hospital - Waterford.

Tucked away on Parkway South, off Exit 81 of Interstate 95, the hospital turned 10 in October.

In 2015, two years after its opening, the facility treated 867 new patients. In the fiscal year that ended Sept. 30, 2023, it treated more than twice as many, according to Mary Ann Nash, director of oncology services for L+M and Westerly hospitals.

“We need a new building,” she said.

Bill Stanley, the former L+M vice president who retired in 2020, oversaw the fundraising, which began in earnest in 2012, the year L+M celebrated its 100th anniversary. The campaign would eventually raise $34.5 million, by far the largest amount raised in the hospital’s history, more than tripling the amount raised in a 1980s campaign that helped fund a major modernization project.

Stanley, a former reporter for The Day, recalled that Dan Brannegan, a retired Pfizer executive, chaired the Centennial Capital Campaign.

“We could not have asked for anyone better to lead a campaign committee comprised of other dedicated, generous volunteers, including Naomi Rachleff, who had chaired the previous capital campaign and volunteered for the hospital for more than 75 years,” Stanley wrote in an email. “We also benefited from a skilled, hard-working staff that helped us actually surpass our goal on the heels of the Great Recession.”

“You've heard the expression, ‘Give 'til it hurts.’ That's what many of our donors did ...,” he wrote.

The campaign’s high point came during a gala that filled the Uncas Ballroom at Mohegan Sun with 2,000 people and netted $350,000.

“Ulysses Hammond, who was chairman of the L+M board at the time, asked the crowd to raise their auction cards if they were willing to donate an extra $100 to the campaign,” Stanley wrote. “In that instant, he raised more than $40,000.”

Brannegan remembered campaign organizers first proposed a fundraising target of about $20 million. When it grew to $22 million to $25 million, the goal still seemed daunting, perhaps out of reach.

The case for the campaign could be capsulized in what the cancer hospital would provide: “world-class care right here at home,” Brannegan said. “Patients wouldn’t have to drive to Dana-Farber in Boston or to Memorial Sloan Kettering in New York. Some were going to Hartford.”

“Chemotherapy and radiation were available at L+M, but we wanted to extend what we were doing,” he said. “Cancer rates in Connecticut, particularly southeastern Connecticut, were high.”

Meanwhile, the Yale New Haven Health system’s Smilow Cancer Hospital in New Haven had opened in 2009, primarily serving the New Haven area. L+M, its current affiliation with Yale New Haven Health still years away, partnered with the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute in pursuing the Waterford cancer hospital.

When Yale New Haven Health acquired L+M and Westerly Hospital in 2015, the Waterford facility joined the Smilow network. Yale New Haven Health opened a Smilow Cancer Hospital Care Center on the second floor of Westerly Hospital in 2019, six months before the COVID-19 outbreak.

Nash, the L+M oncology services director, said Yale New Haven Health, through its Smilow network, has sought to locate a cancer care facility within a 20-minute drive of every Connecticut resident, a goal that’s largely been achieved except in the state’s northern corners. Smilow now has affiliations with more than a dozen facilities around the state.

Moreover, through its affiliation with the Yale Cancer Center, Smilow is the only National Cancer Institute-designated comprehensive cancer center in Connecticut and one of 56 in the United States.

Nash noted that Smilow patients in Waterford benefit from having their cases reviewed by Smilow doctors who meet as so-called tumor boards in New Haven.

“You’ve got the best of the best sitting at that table and looking at a case and, based on pathology, scans, a patient’s quality of life, debating the best way to treat it,” she said.

Nash recalled that a committee that included architects, hospital employees and patients considered minute details of the Waterford facility’s design. All of the patients on the panel called for privacy in areas where chemotherapy is administered.

Dr. Robert Legare, medical director of the Smilow facilities in Waterford and Westerly, said aesthetics are important.

“Right from the start, when you come to the hospital, it’s the access to parking, the way you’re treated at the front desk,” he said. “Everything is respectful of the patients. ... Respectful is the word that resonates.”

Increasingly, much of what goes on at Smilow involves prevention.

“Cancer is not a death sentence anymore,” Nash said. “I wish there was a different name for it. There are far more survivors now than fatalities. About 90% of people diagnosed with some form of cancer will go on to survivorship.”

Smilow has made a major commitment to smoking-cessation, healthy eating and weight loss programs and promotes early-detection screenings, including mammograms.

Since the hospital’s opening, the radiation treatments and chemotherapy delivered there have been made more effective. Though no surgeries are performed at Smilow ― no general anesthesia is administered there ― surgical techniques used in the treatment of the disease also have improved.

“It’s a tree with a lot of roots,” Nash said. “We’re an aging population and cancer is a disease of an aging population. Genetics are part of it. But if we pick away at big stuff like tobacco and eating too much processed food, too much sugar. ... If we can get young people to use sunscreen ... we can do something about it.”

b.hallenbeck@theday.com