Last fall, before I became involved with wowOwow — I got a phone call from Marlo Thomas. We didn’t know each other well, though I had had she and her husband to dinner at my home in Connecticut and they’d invited me to their oh-so-special Christmas party over the years.

But last year, it was a business lunch. Marlo wanted to discuss a subject dear to her heart: St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital in Memphis, TN.

To be honest, my knowledge of St. Jude was vague at best. I knew Marlo’s famous father, comedian Danny Thomas, had founded the hospital. (But where was it exactly?) I knew it was a place for kids with cancer, and I knew they had a massive fund-raising campaign every year. (You couldn’t miss the ads.) But that was about the extent of my knowledge.

And truth be told, I went to lunch not so much out of interest in St. Jude, but out of interest in Marlo, who had fascinated me since her days as "That Girl" and her later contributions to the women’s movement.

If a lunch can change your life, this one changed mine. Marlo wanted me to go and see the hospital, meet the people who worked there and ultimately she wanted me to tell a story about the place on "Nightline."

The more she talked, often with tears in her eyes, the more intrigued I became. St. Jude wasn’t just a hospital; it was the largest research facility for childhood cancer in the world. No child is ever turned away because his or her family can’t pay. In fact, the hospital pays for everything, including getting to Memphis and living there for as long as the treatment takes. Not just for the child, but for the child’s family. What’s more, the hospital was changing — radically changing — survival rates. When the hospital was first opened (now 46 years ago) the survival rate for the most common childhood cancer ALL (acute lymphoblastic leukemia) was only four percent. St. Jude announced recently survival rates of 94 percent.

And as for fund-raising, Marlo told me she and her team raise $600 million a year to make real her father’s promise of a living shrine to hopeless children.

She wanted me to do a story last Christmas. I wasn’t sure. How could I capture the range of what this special place did? Instead, I asked, what about letting us follow just one child over the course of the next year as he or she was treated at St. Jude? The remarkable journey of 12-year-old Daniel Biljanoski is the result.

At about the same time Marlo and I were talking he was being diagnosed with AT/RT (atypical teratoid/rhabdoid tumor) brain cancer – a usually deadly diagnosis. In fact, his doctors in upstate New York removed a goose-egg sized tumor from his brain and gave him less than a year to live.

Thanksgiving night on "Nightline" you will see what Marlo had hoped I could see for myself – the miracle of healing at a hospital of hope.

Please watch. This story is special to all of us who were privileged to work on it.

(ABC, November 27th, Thanksgiving at 11:35 pm EST, check your local listings)

Click here to learn more about the show, and click here for some very special "bonus" footage with Marlo.

Happy Thanksgiving to all.

Click here to see how you can donate to the St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital.

Click here to see how your purchase at Target can benefit the St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital.