Awareness = Funding = Research = Cure

I realize its been a while since we've posted an update. We'll post soon on holiday-related stuff. Today, I wanted to let you know about a couple of things that came out recently. When combined, I hope the pattern is as obvious to you as it is to me. Read below and then click on each piece of media. Do you notice the pattern? OK, perhaps its only obvious to me.... the pattern is that all three of these media came about as a result of a child dying from cancer. I wished these were instead stories of survivorship. Too often, as the Wall Street Journal story, that spawned the letter to the editor below, mistakenly reports, childhood cancer is portrayed as one of the areas where we've had a "victory" in the war against cancer. This misinformed point of view was even adopted by former supreme court justice Sandra Day O'Connor as she argued for more funding for alzheimer's research, now that medical science can cure "formerly intractable diseases like typhoid, polio and many childhood cancers."

The Grim Statistics On Pediatric Cancer (Letter to the Editor Wall Street Journal)
This is a letter to the editor from parents of two children (Penelope and Hazen) that died from neuroblastoma. John and Scott have been relentlessly pursuing a cure for childhood cancers through their foundation Solving Kids Cancer.

Picture Your Life After Cancer (New York Times Multimedia feature)
This is a multimedia feature on the NY Times website. Hannah (with our stand-in for Max) and Nicky's picture (and the story behind why they were featured), will also be featured in the British magazine Easy Living in March '11. The goal here was to insert a childhood cancer story into what was mainly an adult cancer story of survivorship - to remind readers that the war has not been "won" and that the "survivors" of childhood cancer are frequently the affected child's familes.

Photography Interview with Deb Schwedhelm
This is what I call Trojan Horse awareness. Into what otherwise could be an everyday piece of media, a childhood cancer story takes over. This is where the storytelling we've been doing of Max has been so effective - reaching people who may pass over the headline containing the words "childhood cancer." Deb's continued awareness raising of childhood cancer is, like her photographs of Max and our family, priceless.