Roslyn's Marcy Kandel raising awareness for rare cancer through cycling event

Marcy Kandel recognizes the importance of her story but notes she’s just one “unfortunate example” of many who need love and support.

Kandel, 55, of Roslyn, was diagnosed with multiple myeloma — a rare blood cancer that forms in plasma cells (which are white blood cells that produce antibodies that protect us from infection) and make them grow uncontrollably — in August 2023.

Multiple myeloma is not fully curable. Throughout an arduous journey that included emergency neurosurgery on her spine, radiation, chemotherapy, immunotherapy and ultimately a stem cell transplant in February 2024, Kandel chose to focus on the positive. She now is living her best life and has been in a “stable place” for more than 18 months.

About 50% of all cancer patients have a rare cancer, and they often face limited or no treatment options because rare cancer research is underfunded, according to the Memorial Sloan Kettering (MSK) Cancer Center. Kandel’s cause will come to the forefront on Saturday, which will be an incredibly emotional and impactful day.

Cycle for Survival, a series of annual indoor stationary-cycling events nationwide and the official rare cancer fundraising program for MSK, is celebrating its 20th year and has raised more than $440 million since 2007.

Kandel — whose brother, Ross Levine, is MSK’s chief scientific officer and specializes in blood cancer research — has supported Cycle for Survival since its inception and has been riding for most of the past decade.

On Saturday, she will ride with Levine as part of “Team HOPP: Marcy’s Warriors,” which has raised nearly $64,000, at Equinox in Woodbury. About 100 bikes will be set up, music will play throughout the day and more than 1,100 people are expected to ride between Saturday and Sunday.

“[The research] that this money supports is imperative, especially right now,” Kandel told Newsday. “It’s very personal and very important to me as a patient and for other people like myself. I’m not the only one. I’m just one person in seas of thousands and thousands of unfortunate people that are fighting cancer, and rare cancers are a big deal. People don’t talk about them. Cycle for Survival brings them to the forefront in a way that other fundraising doesn’t do.

“It’s really the only one that exists to help support all rare cancer, and 100% of the money goes back to research at Memorial Sloan Kettering. It doesn’t go anywhere else.”

Levine, who is 11 months younger than Kandel, said: “My sister has incredible energy and resolve, and that’s always been true. I think that she really showed that to us even more and in new ways when this challenge was presented to her. And I think she really brought spirit and courage to all of us, not the other way around.

“It was her sort of indomitable spirit that really, I think, allowed all of us to be there for her . . . I’m so proud of her, and I consider all of us lucky that she’s just so strong and so courageous.”

’They saved my life’

Kandel broke a foot in the fall of 2022 and had surgery on it in the spring of 2023. But it just wasn’t healing right.

Her orthopedist was concerned, and she ended up receiving emergency MRIs of her back.

“I got a phone call from a spinal orthopedist on Long Island [that] said, ‘You have to go to the hospital immediately. You can’t wait. You have cancer,’ ” Kandel recalled.

She called Levine and went to MSK in Manhattan that day — Aug. 18, 2023, when she had the emergency neurosurgery. Kandel’s spine was collapsing, and she didn’t know why, other than being told there was some sort of mass. She was diagnosed with multiple myeloma on Aug. 21, then released from the cancer center on Aug. 27.

“The multiple myeloma diagnosis is one part of the story, but the beginning of the story of my spinal surgery was very traumatic and very harmful, and it could have had a very different ending,” Kandel said. “The doctors at Memorial Sloan Kettering, Drs. [Ori] Barzilai and Mark] Bilsky, who are the neurosurgeons, they saved my life. I wouldn’t be walking or able to ride or live my life or walk at my kids’ college graduations [last] spring if it wasn’t for [them].”

Kandel has a rod in her spine, leaving a 10-inch scar on her back. She had a small amount of radiation after her surgery, followed by four months of weekly treatments (chemotherapy and immunotherapy) at MSK in Manhattan and Uniondale. In January 2024, she had a stem cell retrieval. On Feb. 14, 2024, she had an autologous stem cell transplant — a transplant of her own healthy stem cells.

She had to be very mindful of not getting sick after the transplant, but by early summer 2024 she said she was more like herself and carefully “did all the things I wanted to do,” including going to the beach.

The biggest milestone she had circled? May 2025, when she traveled around the country for three weeks to attend her triplets’ graduations — first at Michigan State University, then the University of Texas, and finally George Washington University.

“It was a lot, but it was what I wanted,” she said. “I was able to do it.”

’No time to waste’

Kandel emphasized that you do not have to be an athlete to participate in Cycle for Survival; she isn’t, though Levine has run the New York City Marathon multiple times.

Saturday features a four-hour shift in the morning and another in the afternoon, with speakers — whether it’s a patient, physician or a family member — every hour. Kandel and Levine typically speak together.

Levine emphasized that the money from Cycle for Survival is put to use “right away.”

“The ideas that Cycle for Survival can support are bubbling today,” he said. “We’re very excited to be able to communicate to our community and to the broader community that we’re going to put that effort to work right away, because there’s no time to waste for patients and their families when they’re encountering rare cancers.”

This year marks the third time they will be riding in honor of Kandel, and the second time she physically will ride on her own since her diagnosis.

“It's more of a movement as a participant than it is a fundraising event,” Kandel said. “At its core, that is what it is. We are raising money to help rare cancer research for patients like myself, whether you're a child, an adult.

“But when you're in that room riding, you feel surrounded by love and by other people that understand what it's like. Because there's almost no one in the world that isn't touched by some kind of cancer.”