Kindness That Keeps us Afloat
By Margot | March 10, 2008
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Sam and Max with Tony Hawk
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 Sam and Joe
Little Joe Monaco (Sam’s best friend) to his mother last week: “Mom, I don’t want to give up my dream of being an airline pilot but I think I’m going to be a scientist and cure cancer.â€Â Colleen told him that he can buy his own plane if he cures cancer. Later in the car… “Is anybody even working on it?â€Â “Yes,†says, Colleen, “People are working on it.â€Â  “That’s good because I think I’m going to need some clues.â€Â Pause “Are there any clues?â€I love that. Little Joe is such an awesome friend to Sam.
My friend Miranda and her husband Bill are having a first birthday party for the adorable little Jack. She sent out an evite invitation yesterday that stated “Jackie has a lot of stuff, but if you want to donate in his name see http://www.magicwater.org/. Check out the site and meet our 7 year-old friend Sam who’s fighting the evil neuroblastoma. Sammy’s a real superhero!” Thanks Miranda and Bill for such a kind gesture.
This past weekend Max Mikulak’s teacher, Mrs Sturt and her husband, Daniel Sturt who is the official photographer for Skate Magazine got our families VIP passes to the skate demo The Clash at Clairmont. The boys got to watch the demo up close and then got to actually go up on the ramp to watch the skaters. Tony Hawk stopped and talked to Max and Sam and took pictures with them. Thanks Tony for taking the time. Andy got a high five from him as we left which made his day. Thank you to the Mikulaks and the Sturts and Tony Hawk and all of the skaters who were so nice to us.
I’d like to thank our PeeWee basketball team parents who chipped in and gave me a gift certicate to go out to dinner and a donation to MagicWater for coaching.  I was very touched. I had a lot of fun coaching such a great group of kids.
Sam has a tough week this week in terms of hospital visits. Tomorrow is the MRI which he’ll be awake for because of the last disaster we had and then Wednesday is a bone marrow biopsy (Ugh) which will be sent to Dr. Sholler to see if she can grow Sam’s cells and send them to Dr. Brown at MD. Andersen who is doing morphoproteomics for Dr. Sholler so that we can see what might be most effective for different kids (You can see more about it on the MagicWater website). We are of course hoping that nothing will grow -meaning bone marrow is indeed clear but we want to have our ducks in a row (in case we need them to be in a row).
Next week is Sam’s and Andy’s spring break so we are hitting the road for Arizona and Padres Spring training for a long weekend. Then Grandpa is coming to visit and we have an MIBG scan when we get back.  We took last Wednesday off from the hospital so I don’t have any blood numbers to report. I’ll report again on Wednesday when I’ll have a CBC and chemistry with LDH. I won’t have another VMA/HVA number until early next week. Somehow we seem to always do scans on spring break. Ick. But Arizona will be fun. We’re hoping bones are healing now that copper levels should be back up and we can get Sam’s casts off later this month.
Charlie and Andy pictures next. Doug Sahlin, our website guru, has guided me through getting the pictures up today on our new website (I even resized them with his help) so I should be flooding you with kid pics shortly. Doug also worked early this week on getting all of the archives up for us which is great. Thank you Doug. Thanks a million to everyone who helps keep us going. We are just flat-out floored by people’s kindness. Happy Spring!
Margot Â
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Topics: Progress Reports | 1 Comment »
March 10th, 2008 at 11:27 pm
So glad you all had a good time Saturday! Hope those casts come off soon! You all are in my prayers…
lisa sturt