Three-Time Super Bowl Champ Visits Smilow Cancer Hospital

Angela Khairallah, MSW, LCSW, counseled patients with breast cancer for over a decade at Smilow and whenever she encountered a patient needing financial assistance, she always turned to the Joe Andruzzi Foundation.

“It was amazing to me that every time I identified a patient in need of financial support, I would log in (to the foundation website), and month after month, year after year, there was this tally of patients who were helped,” she said.

Joe Andruzzi is a three-time Super Bowl champion with the New England Patriots and a cancer survivor. After his successful battle with Burkitt lymphoma, a type of non-Hodgkin lymphoma, which abruptly ended his NFL career in 2007, Joe and his wife, Jen, formed the Joe Andruzzi Foundation. The foundation supports patients with cancer and their families in New England meet life’s daily challenges, including paying bills, and assistance with food and transportation.

“I fought a lot of battles on the football field, and nothing was more of the battle than the 50-plus days I spent in a hospital bed,” Andruzzi said. The hospital is where Andruzzi learned that people with cancer face financial struggles on top of fighting for their lives. It’s what inspired his foundation.

On April 17, 2025, Andruzzi visited the Park Street Auditorium at Smilow, where he met with about two dozen social workers from Smilow Cancer Hospital to thank them for their support introducing patients to the foundation. The social workers were equally grateful.

“We cannot express enough appreciation and gratitude for all of the help you have provided to our patients and their families over the years,” said Khairallah, who is now manager of social work for Smilow. “It was overwhelming for me to learn that after 10 years at the Breast Center, there were hundreds of patients – just the patients I worked with – who you helped support financially.”

In the 18 years since the foundation began, it has helped tens of thousands of people by providing millions of dollars in funding.

“It really is an inspiration when folks like Joe and Jen say, I can do something. And even if it starts as something little, it grows and really transforms so many lives,” said Christopher O’Connor, CEO of Yale New Haven Health. “We are really, truly humbled and grateful that the people we have the privilege to treat here at Smilow Cancer Hospital and Yale Cancer Center are just a small part of the people you reach.”

Andruzzi told a story of something that he said happens quite often to him. He will be somewhere – pumping gas or at a store – when someone approaches him and asks if he’s Joe Andruzzi.

“They’ll have tears in their eyes as they’re thanking me because our foundation helped them,” he said. “It’s very rewarding. The greatest two words we get are ‘thank you.’ ”