And while “Mini” Timmy Tyrrell turns 10 on Monday, he’s been raising money for kids with cancer since he was six years old. He vows to never stop; in 2010, his friend Ella Day was diagnosed with a brain tumor.
“He saw the need and he wanted to help,” Ella Day’s mother, Karen Day, says of “Mini.” “He wanted to do anything he could do to help, [for] a six-year-old, that to me is astonishing.”
On the eve of his birthday, “Mini” has raised more than $200,000 for cancer research. Sunday, at the E.G. Smith Baseball Complex in Manassas, 400 players attended the third-annual kickball tournament to raise money for children with cancer.
“What I want to do with my life is continue it,” Kayla said.
“I don’t know how long they can maintain my cancer,” she said. “I don’t know if it is a year, three years or nine. But I have hopes and dreams and things I want to accomplish.”
For now she’s living her dream as a college student — only now with a plan to be a nurse practitioner treating childhood cancer.
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Kayla’s other dream right now is to raise money and awareness for childhood cancer. In her first fund-raising venture she raised $15,000 for research. She’s now shooting for $400,000.
“My hair was long and ratty and it looked terrible, and I just got sick of trying to take care of it and trying to make it look decent,” he told the crowd at Hawk’s Mane Event, the fundraiser he held at his house on June 28 to benefit his foundation for children with cancer. “I was just going to chop it off and show up the next day at football and not say anything.
“My wife, being the smart lady she is, said, ‘Nah, we have to do something with it.’ I was just going to send it off to Wigs for Kids and hopefully put it toward making a wig for a kid going through chemo. [But] we decided to start our own thing.”
Their “own thing” was Hawk’s Locks for Kids, which provides supporting patient care of women and children throughout the Ohio State Comprehensive Cancer Center at the James Cancer Hospital and Solove Research Institute. The main goal of the charity has been to provide wigs for children who have lost their hair due to their battle with cancer.
MANASSAS, Va. – A Virginia family has come up with a special way to honor their son. They’re working with other children diagnosed with the same kind of cancer he had, and their unique approach has them raising a glass.
Jeremy Meyers brews beer, but the recipe is all heart. He and his wife, Sarah, founded Bad Wolf Brewing Company in Manassas because they love craft beer, too. The atmosphere at their brewery is so comfortable that the first time Mickey Johnson came in as a customer, he told the Meyers about his son Cody, who died of cancer when he was just 6 years old.
Profits from the sale of the beer will go toward the Cody’s Crew Foundation to fund childhood cancer research.
I’m sorry. I am sorry that you are part of this group. I am sorry you now have the title of cancer mom. Your life has changed. In one split second your world just fell apart. Allow yourself to cry, it will make you feel better. Allow yourself to kick and scream and have a tantrum, let it take all your energy, because there are somedays that crying is all you can do for the day. The fog will lift, I promise. The feeling you get when you walk into a store or a restaurant, that feeling that everything is surreal, that you want to turn around and walk out because everyone in that place is happy and laughing, it will go away. In place of that, you will look at people that are constantly unhappy with their lives and remind them of how precious life is.
Maintenance? Not a lot of people are familiar with what maintenance is. It’s the longest stage of treatment for leukemia that comes after several months of intense chemotherapy. Every month you go in to clinic for a check-up, and some months you have a spinal tap. There are a lot of pills too. Here’s the catch though, if you have a fever you have to go to the ER to get checked for an infection.
For me, maintenance is bittersweet. You have a month of freedom uninterrupted by doctors’ appointments or hospital visits (if you’re lucky). When that month ends, it feels as if it went by so fast, and then reality comes back to remind you you’re not done with treatment yet.
Although pediatric cancer research is making great strides, a funding shortage threatens further progress in this lifesaving field.
In one groundbreaking trial, researchers injected a young college student’s brain tumor with a form of the polio virus. Because she had previously received the polio vaccine, the girl’s body began to fight the tumor. Once the size of a lime, it’s now the size of a pea.
“When you hear a story like that, it sends chills up your spine,” said Jay Scott, co-executive director of Alex’s Lemonade Stand Foundation.
But scientific breakthroughs can occur only if medical research receives sufficient funding
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Next month, Alex’s Lemonade Stand Foundation (ALSF) is teaming up with Northwestern Mutual to host its second Young Investigators Summit and inspire a new generation of pediatric cancer researchers to find treatments and cures in this vastly underfunded field.
“Anybody who can do the math can figure out that kids are getting shortchanged,” said Scott, who believes that cures for most kids can be found within five to ten years.
Nine in ten pediatric cancer researchers say lack of funding is the biggest obstacle to finding a cure,according to a survey by Northwestern Mutual. And nearly a fifth of researchers are considering leaving the field, primarily because of a lack of funds.
“That’s a real eye-opener,” said Scott. “We don’t want to lose a whole generation of potential cancer researchers.”
