Turning a Day of Sadness into a Day of Hope, Good news, Save the Date, and more!

March 18th, 2010 was a terrible day for us - one we will never, ever forget. It was the day Elena was diagnosed. The anniversary of her diagnosis is coming up in about a month and we want to turn that day from one of sadness into a day of hope. We need your help!

1st: Come to a celebration we will be holding in honor of one year of Elena kicking cancer's trash!!!

When: Saturday, March 19th from 9am-2pm

Where: 114 South 400 West, Orem (Cultural Hall of the LDS Meetinghouse)

What: To celebrate one year of Elena kicking cancer's trash! We will be doing a service project and a blood drive. For the service project, we will be assembling kits for families of newly diagnosed cancer patients at Primary Children's Hospital. We received one of these in the first few days after Elena was diagnosed and we want to pay it forward and give some support to people going through what we did because we know what a terrible time it is.

There will also be good food, good company, and hopefully it will just be a very fun, meaningful night all around.

So, come! We want you to celebrate with us and we need your blood. Haha. :) Seriously, we need 25-30 committed donors. Even if you can't stay long or can only drop in, please stop by and give blood! You - yes YOU! Even friends and family of friends and family are invited. Please come give.

2nd: In order to make our service project a success we need your help in rounding up donations for the kits. This can be done by purchasing and donating the items needed directly, or sending money ahead of time for us to purchase the needed items. If you need our address, let me know in a comment or an e-mail and I'll send it to you. Here are ideas for what we are looking to put into the kits:

• Travel Blanket - like a fleece blanket that can be rolled up and secured with a strap or something. For parents mostly - the hospital has like a million blanket donations, so the kids are pretty well taken care of each visit. :)
• Stuffed animals: need to be small-ish and MUST be new. The hospital can not accept used stuffed animals for health reasons
• Small toys/Activities: same rules as above - NO used toys.
• Hand sanitizer
• Lotion (travel size)
• Chapstick
• Books about cancer for children: ("I'm a Superhero", "My ABC Book of Cancer", "Chemo-Girl(/Boy): Saving the World One Treatment at a Time", etc.) You can purchase individual books off of the internet or send money for us to purchase them.
• Doctor kits for kids to play with
• Gas Cards (Chevron, Texaco, Sinclair, Maverick, 7-11 are all local stations)

We have got the snacks for the kits covered, but they will also be included. Other than no used items, the only other guideline that the hospital gave us was NO latex.

Your help, in honor of Elena, is SO appreciated! We can't do this without you.

Please RSVP to the party (e-mail, leave a comment, text, or call) no later than Wednesday, March 16th, so we know how many treats to plan on. If you will be available to give blood (in generally good health, 17 years or older, and not pregnant), please let us know ASAP, so we can get you the form you need to fill out and let the blood bank know that we have the required number of people to hold the blood drive. We're so excited!!

And if you don't live nearby and won't be able to come, please consider giving blood wherever you are at, in honor of Elena's one year diagnosis anniversary.

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Now for some good news. We attended the Leukemia and Lymphoma Society (LLS) Light the night awards banquet a few nights ago. And look what we brought home:

It says:

Top Fundraising Team (not corporate, but friends and family)

2nd place (!)

Team Elena.

Way to go everyone!!! This is a tribute to all of your hard work and sacrifice. Thanks for all you did to help us raise money for LLS! We feel it is one of many worthwhile organizations out there. We learned several impressive things about LLS that night - money raised goes towards lots of great things, like

• Research - childhood and adult cancer. Three noteworthy things we found out: 1. The LLS works with the FDA to help shorten the time between a new chemotherapy getting approved and actually getting out to patients. It used to take up to 7-8 years, but now they are working to shorten that to a more reasonable time table like one year, 2. Of 40 new chemotherapy medicine to come out last year, 19 of those were for blood cancer, and the LLS was behind the funding for almost all of them (now I may have a few of the numbers off, but this is the basic gist of it...) , and 3. Researching how to treat cancer in a medium of blood is much easier to research than in a medium like tissue. Research for blood cancer is very beneficial to many different types of cancer - breast cancer, ovarian cancer, tumors, etc. So, supporting blood cancer research as a whole is really supporting cancer research in general - which touches all of our lives in many ways. A rising tide lifts all ships, right?
• Patient Support - including a great new program they're working on to help patients pay their co-pay fees, patient financial aid programs, etc.
• Community education and awareness
• And more!

Elena has been asked to participate in their "Honored Patient" program this year. Basically she will be one of the faces of the LLS this year - in their advertising, at kick-off events, fundraising meetings with corporations, etc. We are excited to be able to help in any way with cancer research, support, etc. We figure that raising money and awareness for any type of cancer research is a worthy goal - and this requires so little effort on our part. If this is a small way to make a difference for many different people in many different situations - we're happy to help. There are children and adults, young and old, babies and parents and grandparents who are being diagnosed by cancer and we feel this is a way we can help them all a little. Elena has leukemia, so we have a special reason to support childhood leukemia research, but Eric's grandfather, Robert Hastings, also has a lymphoma, so the LLS is a great fit for our family.

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Now, save the date:

March 19th - Elena's One Year Diagnosis Service Project and Blood Drive

July 9th - CureSearch Walk in SLC! CureSearch is a great organization that raises money for the Children's Oncology Group (COG). Our hospital (Primary's) and oncologists are members of COG - they are the big research organization for children's cancer, to say it briefly. They are a superb organization to support in order to further childhood cancer research. Please plan on joining us if you can. We'll get more information about time, place, how to donate, and what fundraisers we'll be doing to get ready as it gets closer. We're so thrilled to be participating in this this year as it's the first year its come to SLC- get excited! You can go to the CureSearch SLC website to learn more: http://www.curesearchwalk.org/faf/home/default.asp?ievent=452894.

September 24th - LLS Light the Night Walk in SLC. More info will follow as it becomes available. Hope to see you there, if you can!