September 17: Selling Lemonade, Running Miles, and Saving Lives

As an oncology parent, you do a lot of waiting and worrying. We have our fair share of "hands on" by assisting with holding our children down during scary or painful procedures, learning home care, administering medications, and memorizing the full medical chart to rattle off to every new provider we meet. Other than that, there is a... lot of sitting on the side lines and watching things happen to your child and wishing you could change them.

Once you get through the critical times (and sometimes even during), parents take on a new role of Childhood Cancer Champion. We fight for our child and every other child we meet in the hospital and oncology clinic. As we go through treatments with our child, we wish there was a better way, an easier treatment, something to save them. When we learn there is none and that research is almost exclusively funded by families with sick children, we start looking for ways to get involved.

To prevent the flu, we get flu shots. If we suffer from seasonal allergies, we pick up some over the counter medications at the nearest drugstore. When we get a stomach bug, we lay around and moan for 24 hours while we wait for it to pass. But when a child gets cancer, their parents have to get creative with fundraising and make some noise to raise awareness to try to save them.

Our family has sold lemonade, popcorn, t-shirts, and crafts, we have run 5k's , we've counted stitches and counted miles, and we are always looking for the next thing to do to try to save our daughter and her friends. This month, Tillery's mom and dad are each running/walking 100 miles for awareness and her 5-year-old brother is walking 5 miles. Today, we are participating in a Move-a-thon, where we will run, walk, bike, and tricycle around a church parking lot for pledge donations to cancer research.

Our daughter deserves better options than lemonade sales and her parents running abilities. She needs a cure and for that she needs YOU!

Here is our donation link for September. You can donate any amount and it will all add up. If you'd like to make a per lap pledge for our move-a-thon today, let us know. You can even sponsor Tillery who will be walking in circles on legs that have only been moving for 153 days. Today, she's walking to save her friends.
https://www.alexslemonade.org/mypage/1261673