and Martina McBride's "I'm gonna Love You Through It"...
After seeing those videos and watching how various country artists recently visited St. Judes, I just needed to get this out. So bear with me today, because I have a couple of stories. The first story comes from another mother's blog and the other is the story of how everything has come full circle.
"Welcome to Holland"
By Emily Perl Kingsley, 1987.
When you're going to have a baby, it's like planning a fabulous vacation trip - to Italy. You buy a bunch of guide books and make your wonderful plans. The Coliseum. The Michelangelo David. The gondolas in Venice. You may learn some handy phrases in Italian. It's all very exciting.
After months of eager anticipation, the day finally arrives. You pack your bags and off you go. Several hours later, the plane lands. The stewardess comes in and says, "Welcome to Holland."
"Holland?!?" you say. "What do you mean Holland?? I signed up for Italy! I'm supposed to be in Italy. All my life I've dreamed of going to Italy."
But there's been a change in the flight plan. They've landed in Holland and there you must stay.
The important thing is that they haven't taken you to a horrible, disgusting, filthy place, full of pestilence, famine and disease. It's just a different place.
So you must go out and buy new guide books. And you must learn a whole new language. And you will meet a whole new group of people you would never have met.
It's just a different place. It's slower-paced than Italy, less flashy than Italy. But after you've been there for a while and you catch your breath, you look around.... and you begin to notice that Holland has windmills....and Holland has tulips. Holland even has Rembrandts.
But everyone you know is busy coming and going from Italy... and they're all bragging about what a wonderful time they had there. And for the rest of your life, you will say "Yes, that's where I was supposed to go. That's what I had planned."
And the pain of that will never, ever, ever, ever go away...because the loss of that dream is a very very significant loss. But...if you spend your life mourning the fact that you didn't get to Italy, you may never be free to enjoy the very special, the very lovely things ... about Holland.
In an effort to be open with this blog, I'll admit that I had a good cry the first every time I read that. George and I both had plans before Clayton. We knew things we wanted to do and where we wanted to go even if we didn't know how we were going to get there. Then there was Clayton. From the beginning, we have never been able to "plan" anything about Clayton. He has seen his share of obstacles ever since he was a 14-week-old little being in my belly. Everything about him has always been a surprise, but never a regret. As Clayton has grown and things have settled over his three years, we had once again started to make plans. New plans. Plans that included hospitals "just in case" there were every any more issues. No big deal, it was relatively easy to rework some of our plans to include Clayton and work around potential needs. Plans that included adventure and fun and traveling (my passion) and hunting and fishing (George's passions).
Everyone knows what happened next... the c-word struck. On top of everything else, the one scenario we never considered had suddenly become our reality. But only momentarily did we let cancer limit us. You see cancer is our Holland. There was a time when I would have thought that the kidney disease Clayton was born with would have been our Holland, but it wasn't. All along it was cancer, kidney disease was just the opening act preparing us and equipping us with the tools we needed for this much bigger battle.
When we were going through the kidney issues when he was a baby, I formed The George Clayton Foundation. It was meant to help kids with kidney disease. I was younger, less experienced, a new mom and had a lot on my plate and needless to say it never went anywhere. But all these years, I held on to the name and kept it as a non-profit even though I wasn't doing anything with it. It was meant for this and I now know that. Like I said, cancer is our Holland, and becoming advocates for pediatric cancer is part of the beauty we would never have seen had our "plans" not been thwarted from the beginning. So this is the beginning of our new journey. So while we might always be somewhat limited, we still have options, we can still travel and do things and most importantly because of all of this, we are able to the the beauty somewhere like "Holland" has to offer.
All of that said, we plan on making the most of The George Clayton Foundation. I know that there are some fundraisers already being planned by others and we have lots of ideas of our own. So, the next year will be spent doing a lot of planning and research and then we hope to have lots of new and exciting things going on with The George Clayton Foundation in the future. The goal will be simple: to raise awareness for pediatric cancer and raise funds for research .
Additionally, we will try our hardest to raise awareness for ALL pediatric cancer research institutes. The word ALL is important. St. Jude's is so well known and recognizable that I think people fail to see how many other amazing institutes there are out there. The number one difference in St. Jude's and these other institutes isn't the quality of research, it is in the fact that St. Jude's will treat patients at no cost to their families. So it is important to remember various institutes when thinking about a cure for pediatric cancer. Some institutes focus on certain cancers more than others and sometimes it is just beneficial to have more people, from different places, with different backgrounds looking for answers. HERE is a list of institutes that have oncologists who specialize in Neuroblastoma and below is a list of the nation's top institutes for pediatric cancer.
1. Children's Hospital Boston and Dana-Farber Cancer Institute
2. Children's Hospital of Philidelphia
3. St Jude's
4. Texas Children's Hospital
5. Cinccinatti Children's Hospital and Medical Center
6. Children's Hospital Los Angeles
7. Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center
8. Seattle Children's Hospital
9. John Hopkin's Children's Center
10. Children's Hospital Colorado
Children's of Alabama (UAB) is #39
USACW is not listed but with some support, maybe they could be.
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