Walking in Honor of Kaelyn

Saturday was the 6th annual St. Jude Give Thanks Walk. Our Team Kaelyn didn't participate in the first walk. At that time, my little niece was sick, but the doctors hadn't diagnosed her cancer as yet. That didn't happen until December after the first walk in November. We had yet to find out in a very personal family way the great work St. Jude does. 

Of course, we knew about St. Jude's. We knew that Danny Thomas began the hospital to help kids get well. I knew a family whose child was treated there and fought the good fight but wasn't able to defeat the cancer enemy. 

And then Kaelyn's symptoms got worse so her parents took her to another doctor right before they planned to make the trip back to Kentucky for Christmas. That doctor ordered new tests that revealed the cancer and Kaelyn's parents were given the frightful warning that she possibly only had two days to live and they needed to get her to St. Jude as fast as possible. So they did. Christmas trips home were forgotten. A diagnosis like makes one focus on what matters most and to a mother or father, a child's health is something to fight for, tooth and nail. Thank God, that St. Jude's Hospital feels the same way and without delay, the war against Kaelyn's cancer was declared. For a while, Kaelyn, who was a bubbly five-year-old at the time, refused to talk. One minute she was going home for Christmas. The next moment she was in a hospital with needles and drugs that made her feel even worse and people saying she might die. That's a lot for a little girl to absorb. 

But her wonderful parents and the people at St. Jude's helped her though that with love and compassion and the assurance of hope. She joined the fight with great spirit. It was difficult for her to lose her long, curly hair so her father shaved off his hair to show that hair didn't really matter that much. After months of treatments, Kaelyn's cancer was declared in remission. After three long years of treatments, she heard the word that her family and hundreds, perhaps thousands, of friends across the country had been praying to hear. Cured. Some of you were in that number praying for Kaelyn. And those prayers were answered. I posted about St. Jude No More Chemo Party here on One Writer's Journal a couple of years ago. 

Now Kaelyn is a happy, healthy child again. Going to school. Making friends every day wherever she goes. Not having to wear that mask against germs. She can have a cold now without having to rush to the hospital. She's always ready to speak up for St. Jude's Hospital and help their fundraising any way she can even though she's still just a little girl. But she knows some of the kids she met at St. Jude's are still fighting the fight. She knows that new kids are hearing the dreadful diagnosis she got. She knows St. Jude's can help those kids win the war against cancer as she did. When St. Jude's Hospital was established, only twenty percent of the kids like Kaelyn who had leukemia survived. Now that number is up to eighty percent survivors. St. Jude fights for kids. They fought for our Kaelyn. They want to make the survival rate ninety percent or even better. And so our family, Team Kaelyn, walked in the St. Jude Give Thanks Walk in Kaelyn's honor. 

It was a blessing to see her being just a regular kid playing with the other kids as we walked back through the zoo to see the animals. She's the one in the middle of the crate at the gorilla exhibit. God is good. 

So, I just wanted to share about why we walked in honor of Kaelyn since so many of you prayed for her and her family. Thank you so much. Prayers make a difference.

If you would like to read how a prayer Danny Thomas prayed early in his career led to many children getting a second chance at life the way Kaelyn has, go to Danny's Promise on the St. Jude website. A great story.

Thank you for reading and for praying. You're the best.  

Winners, Bicycles and Birthdays

My birthday month is over. September has slipped away too soon. No more birthday stories in my e-mail box. :( It's been a crazy month down here on the farm with Christmas at Harmony Hill out in September and Orchard of Hope coming out in its new package on October 1. Add in one of Mom's caretakers being sidelined with cataract surgery and a deadline for editing my next Rosey Corner book that included the need to snip out 13,000 plus words and you can see why I needed a few more days in September. Only 3,500 words to go! I see the light at the end of the tunnel. Hope it's not a train. 

But before we head out on a new trail, we've got a few more birthday noise makers to blow and one more story to share. 

Did you ever have your own bicycle? I didn't. I had a hand me down that needed tires, my inspiration for Jocie's old bike in Scent of Lilacs.Tara left this story in a comment on a post here, but I wanted to share it again. 

"My best birthday memory. As a second child I spent a lot of time in hand me downs. Clothes, shoes, bicycles. My older sister had a very different style than I did, so her old blue bicycle with a banana seat was not my favorite. Every trip to town for groceries would see me at the Western Auto adjacent to the grocery store, riding around and around a little yellow BMX bike. Every year, I participated in (and rocked!) the St Judes Bike-a-thon in our tiny, tiny town and I wanted nothing more than to NEVER have to ride that hand me down blue bike again to do so. I have NO idea how many miles I logged on that little yellow bike just riding up and down the aisles until Mom was done at the grocery store. I will never forget Mom telling me to take out the trash or some equally unpleasant chore, on my birthday, no less, only to discover it was a ploy to get me to go around back where that little yellow bmx was waiting for me. I continued to ride it in those Bike-a-thons for years to come. One year, I earned enough pledge money to provide every participant with the t-shirt prize after it was all divvied up."

When I read Tara's story I was doubly touched, by her mother knowing how much she wanted the bike and finding a way to get it for her and by Tara's eagerness to raise money for St. Jude's even as a child. You may remember that my great-niece was treated for cancer at St. Jude's and one of my Facebook posts about her went viral a year or so ago. You can read that old blog post, Honk, Honk for Good News if you're interested. Anyway, when I asked Tara about using her story here, this is what she said, "Oh please go ahead and use it :) My best friend had cancer, she passed away when I was 11. She was treated at St Jude and it is still the charity that gets 99% of my charity dollars."





In November I'll be taking part in the St. Jude Walk in Louisville because Tara is right. Once you've seen how St. Jude wants to cure every child, you want to keep helping them have the money to find those cures.

But now get all those birthday noisemakers ready. It's time to announce winners. You may have already seen the names since I sent out a newsletter on Tuesday with the winners and the news that my book Words Spoken True was/is a free download. Only a few more hours for that so if you have an e-reader and haven't read my story set in 1855 Louisville with political intrigue, lots of romance and even a serial killer on the loose, you can download it today for free. (And yes, I know this is Thursday and that I'm a day late posting. I was in such a frenzy of editing out words last night I forgot to post.) 

Oh yeah, back to the winners of my Christmas at Harmony Hill Giveaway Celebration. Donna V. wins 1st prize, the Shaker hand ornament and her choice of one of my books. Sue B. won 2nd prize of the quilt hanging and her choice, Christmas at Harmony Hill. Rachel L can't say she "never wins" anymore since she wins the Tea book, Melody Carlson's The Christmas Shoppe and she also picked Christmas at Harmony Hill. As as extra bonus, Peggy C is my "just because" winner. Angel Sister is one of her favorite books, so she picked Small Town Girl. (I haven't heard from Donna, so if I don't by next week, I'll pick a new winner.)

Thank you all for taking part in my giveaway fun and for sharing your birthday stories. I enjoyed reading them so much and in my very unscientific survey, I discovered surprise parties make great memories, especially if you're turning 50, that grandkids are cute blowing out candles, and that everybody loves a birthday cake with chocolate the favorite there.

Out of room for this post, but check back Sunday (or maybe Monday. lol) I'll have to celebrate Orchard of Hope being back out for readers somehow.

The Next Thirty Years

~~Today is my great niece, Kaelyn's birthday. She's six. Some of you may have been following her or my reports on her on Facebook. But in case you haven't, here's a bit of her story. Last year before Christmas she got sick several times and couldn't seem to get completely better. They thought it was the flu and/or other common maladies that all kids have. But then the week before Christmas on the day the family was planning to start home for a Christmas celebration with the extended family, a lump came up under her neck. A visit to the doctor just to make sure it wasn't anything serious turned into three months at St. Jude's Hospital after a diagnosis of acute leukemia. They didn't get to go home. They didn't get to do anything except go straight to St. Jude's. Suddenly nothing was as important as getting this little girl the best treatment possible. And thank God for Danny Thomas and his vision of curing all young people of cancer with the best possible treatment center in the world. The treatments are horrendous but the care has been superior. She has now entered her second phase of treatment. The cancer is in remission and the battle is now on to eradicate it from her body forever. For two years she will have to undergo treatments every few weeks. For two years any time she so much as runs a fever, she'll have to go to the hospital. For forever she will float along on the thousands of prayers that have been offered up for her because of many churches taking her and her family into their hearts and onto their prayer lists and for all the friends and strangers who have read about her on Facebook and have prayed for healing for her. And today she's six and getting to eat pizza and birthday cake because her blood tests show her counts are up.

~~Some of you may have fought similar battles in your families for those you loved as you prayed for their healing. Sometimes that healing comes and sometimes it doesn't. Sometimes accidents steal our loved ones before their time. We're tough and fragile at the same time. And we're not guaranteed tomorrow.

~~Not long ago on a long ride home from somewhere I tuned into a country station on the radio. A song came on where the singer was saying in his next thirty years he'd do things different. He'd live better, kick all his bad habits, love his family and more or less be a model citizen. I don't remember exactly what he planned, but the lyric "my next thirty years" caught my attention because none of us knows if we'll have a next thirty years. We hope so. We want to look that far in the future and still imagine breathing. But we don't know. We expect to. That's why I'm working hard to finish my current book - because I fully expect to be here on July 1 when I have promised to have the book finished. If we didn't expect tomorrow we wouldn't have much motivation for a lot of the chores or work we are doing today.

~~But I got to thinking about my next thirty years and you know what? If I make it that long I hope I'll be able to keep putting words together. Keep making reading friends. At least for part of those thirty years. I look back at the last thirty years and wonder how they could have passed so quickly. Some of the things I did during those years I might like to have a do-over, but there are no do-overs in life. There are only the next thirty years or the next thirty days or the next thirty minutes.

~~I'm glad today we can say Happy Birthday to Kaelyn. She should have many more than thirty years ahead of her now, thanks to the advances in cancer treatment and her wonderful dedicated doctors and nurses. But today she's six and getting to blow out those six candles and make a wish. I'm so thankful for that.

~~How do you feel about your next thirty years? What would you like to write in your journal thirty years from now? Whatever it is, I hope it will be joyful. Maybe I'll look back in my journal to thirty years ago and see what I was expecting in the next thirty years. I published my first book 32 years ago.