| | D-Day for Me:
I need your help
In my last entry, I mentioned that my grandfather's scars taught me a lot about what it means to follow your honor and sacrifice for others. I also mentioned two heroes who had recently been lost to me, and that the lessons of my family had driven me to do things in my own life to prevent the untimely loss and suffering of friends and family.
Over the last several years, LaRae and I have lost several people to blood cancers. We've seen them suffer and ultimately fall to their bodies attacking themselves and their medical aid. I've watched friends and family purposefully get up every morning for weeks to go spend thousands of dollars to poison themselves in hopes that they'll kill off the right cells along with the wrong ones.
I'm tired of standing idly by and letting these people fight by themselves. I'm going to do something about it.
I'm a scientist. I spend the majority of my days in a lab playing with statistics and people. The best thing I could do is find a cure, but I don't have the expertise or the funding. The next best thing would be to provide patient care, to develop a system where people with Leukemia or Lymphoma could be cared for throughout their treatments...but I don't have the space or the organizational acumen.
But I can run. Not very well. I'm overweight and I enjoy good beer. But I can run.
So I will run. On October 7th I will run the Chicago Marathon for the Leukemia and Lymphoma society. Along the 50,000 steps of that marathon and the 10,000,000 or so prior to it, I will have my friend Cory C. in the front of my mind. I know Cory through Baylor. He has struggled with cancer for more than the 6 years that I've known him. He's been through dozens of chemo regimens, each knocking him out of commission for weeks at a time. I've seen him in absolutely horrendous shape. But I have never seen him with a low spirit. This gentleman has faced some of the most difficult things in life and has done so with humility and an infectious excitement about life that still stuns me...and I research this stuff for a living.
So this is my D-Day. Not to lesson the sacrifice of those boys who went ashore at Omaha Beach, but to say that I have learned a lesson from their sacrifices. My training will be tough. But my running the hills of Cameron Park in a Texas summer is nothing compared to the years of medical care, the months of chemotherapy and the endless needles that people like Cory have to endure. To the thousands of leukemia patients, every day is a test of endurance that I cannot imagine; theirs is the longer race.
People like Cory have a much better outlook now than they did just a few years ago, largely due to the efforts of The Leukemia and Lymphoma Society. The funds that they raise go to support research, medical aid and patient support across the U.S. The commitment I've made to Cory, the Society, and others is to raise $4,000 toward that goal. And I need your help.
You can track my progress in both running and fundraising at my personal running site (http://www.active.com/donate/tntctx/Boof). There I'll update on my distance and my personal heroes, and there you can donate directly (and 100% tax deductively) to the cause.
Thank you to my family for teaching me that these kinds of things are important. And from the true endurance athletes - the ones who fight off their own bodies every day with chronic illness - thank you too.
Please visit my site and help me run for Cory.
|
| | Posted 6/7/2007 10:37 AM - 82 Views - 6 eProps - 3 comments
- recommend
  - recs0
- share
- email
 - sent0
|
