Wearing a red bandanna around his head and flitting from group to lethargic group of bleary-eyed dancers, 19-year-old Benjamin Resnick looked like any other marathoner in the cluttered White Building gym yesterday.

But Ben Resnick, whose bandanna covered a head "as bald as a billiard ball," in the words of his mother Nan Resnick, has cancer.

Diagnosed two years ago, the State College resident must have a bone marrow transplant to kick the cancer that has invaded his body and forced him to take painful chemotherapy treatments every three weeks.

"Somewhere in Ben there's a cell waiting to become a tumor," Nan Resnick said. "The transplant is the only chance my son has of a full cure. But nobody says die until there's nothing left to try."

The Resnicks will travel to West Penn Hospital in Pittsburgh tomorrow for an interview to find out if Ben qualifies for the high-risk operation, Nan Resnick said.

Ben Resnick, said he expects to be accepted for the transplant and said he hopes it will end his cancer, called non-Hodgekins B-cell lymphoma and characterized by a tumor in his spinal column. Resnick said he has refused to continue his chemotherapy treatments because of the extreme pain and limited positive response.

"I don't know enough about (the procedure) now to be scared," he shouted, trying to be heard above the blaring music. "I told my mom not to tell me about it till I go in. That way I'll have no chance of backing out."

Describing her son's complex treatment and ensuing surgery, Nan Resnick said, "We're going into what I call science fiction."

The transplant requires doctors to siphon blood out of Ben Resnick's body for 10 days and harvest all of the stem cells out of it, Nan Resnick said. Then the doctors will "devastate him with chemotherapy," she said.

"In order to get all the bad cells, they have to kill the good ones too," she explained.

After that, the doctors will place the blood, with growth factor added, back into his body, she said.

Both Ben Resnick, who said he had been at the event for more than 30 hours, and his mother applauded the marathon and the dancers, who were "standing together so they could stand on their own."

"I can identify," Nan Resnick said. "I don't think there's a cancer family in this world who hasn't spent days without sleep. To volunteer to do it is incredible."

Port Trevor resident Melissa Showers agreed, as she watched her four-year-old son Zachary gleefully shoot a stream of cold water from a squirt bottle randomly into the slowly moving legs of a group of dancers.

Zachary was diagnosed with Rhabdomyosarcoma, a type of cancer characterized by a tumor in the prostate gland, at 20 months of age, Showers said.

After 2½ years of chemotherapy treatments, several surgeries and some help from the Four Diamonds Fund, Zachary has "excellent chances" of not suffering a relapse and now must only visit a doctor every three months for testing and checkups, Showers said.

"We just really appreciate them doing this," Showers said. "This is our third year coming here, and it's just overwhelming."