Thank you doesn’t come close. Counting the cash and checks we brought home today, plus our online donations, we have currently raised $39,620. Fabulous. And, of course, it was so much more than that. I will now repost what I wrote after last year’s event, because there’s no point in reinventing the wheel here: As […]
Ready for these? Oh, they’re good ones alright … From a restaurant in New Jersey: And another in Hawaii: A friend of my brother’s saw this one in a bar in Denver: A high school in Chicago: A different friend in Chicago was obviously in the very same building: At a Starbucks in Bowling Green: […]
Whatever you celebrate, wherever you are… be a light in the darkness. From a recent post I wrote for St. Baldrick’s: Lighting the Darkness By Krissy Dietrich Gallagher, mother to Austin, 2012 Ambassador Kid My grandfather died on December 21, 1982. The shortest – and darkest — day of the year. Cancer, of course. My […]
This one might be a little rough, so consider yourself warned. As so much we’ve seen and read and watched has been rough over the past few days … Mark and I had that horrid conversation the other day, that I imagine many parents of the sick have had this weekend. It’s a rather gut-wrenching […]
It never ceases to amaze me how quickly we can revert back to our old roles. How seamlessly we become who we once were: the patient and the advocate, the comforter and the distractor. It’s as if we never left that old hospital world; it all feels so familiar, so deep in our bones, even […]
Austin is having surgery this Friday at Akron Children’s. Surgeries, actually, two procedures rolled into one. They’re minor and non-cancer related. Just a long overdue tonsillectomy and finger repair. You may remember that his swollen tonsils (besides keeping us all up at night) prevented him from being sedated for his May MRI, requiring us to […]
Yesterday was our last day as patients at Rainbow. No, we haven’t magically moved to some elusive category of you’re-so-healthy-you-need-no-more-follow-up-care (but if such a category exists, I’d sure like to be placed in it someday). No, no, instead, we are switching hospitals. I know, that one came as a shock, right? We love Rainbow, that […]
Austin had his two-and-a-half year scans today. He went briefly to school to partake in the Grands Day celebrations, but I picked him up at 10:30 and we headed down to Rainbow for a long day of procedures. First an EKG and ECHO, because he needs clearance from cardiology before his December 7th surgeries (tonsillectomy […]
… another hospital. A new hospital this time, too. Don’t worry — nothing bad happened. I just finally got around to making appointments for the non-essential, non-emergency, non-cancer-related issues that have been bothering Austin for the past six months. First, those pesky tonsils. Which don’t actually bother Austin at all. I mean, he snores, loudly, […]
I’m not going to keep harping on the start of the school year (I’ll have other things to harp about soon, I promise!), but here is the link to an article posted on the St. Baldrick’s site last week. Which contains, as Mark pointed out, the best single line description of Austin’s personality to date. […]