1/18/09: St. Jude Trip

Hey everyone,
What an amazing past couple days it has been. I just got back from Memphis earlier today where I was visiting the St. Jude Hospital. You would think that the atmosphere at St. Jude would be hard to take, but it was the total opposite... In fact, it was a complete place of HOPE. The amazing thing about St. Jude is that they are moving closer and closer everyday towards cures for cancer. There are scientist who work specifically on cell research to scope out not only the cancer attacks, but their equipment allows them to get an eyes view inside the cells to see exactly what it is that's going on.

St. Jude is run strictly on donations and there is no cost to the the patients or their families, it's all covered by the donations. As a matter of fact, it cost 1.4 million dollars a day to run the hospital... so calculate that over a years time. You can just imagine the tons of donations being made. There are so many good people in the world who are willing to help out which is totally awesome!! A huge part of these donations of course goes towards cancer research and finding cures. Some cancer's have higher recovery rates, but unfortunately from what we learned there are other cancers that can only be treated for a certain period of time, but the cure for stopping them completely hasn't been pin pointed yet. I have no doubt that those hard working researchers of the St. Jude Hospital will find the connections and cures their looking for. Another interesting thing I found out is that the hospital is in the loop of new discoveries made everyday by the researchers. As a matter of fact, a newsletter goes around the hospital every 17 hours.

There were quite a few touching moments during the visit and just to name a few... there was a wall in which had a row of poems lettered from A to Z that were written by the patients receiving treatments for their cancer. These poems and letters were beautiful. It really put into perspective how amazing these kids really are. I already knew that they were amazing little angels, but after reading what they had to say, and a lot of it was to do with HEAVEN and GOD, oh man what can I say it filled my heart with LOVE. We were all given tour guides to take us around the hospital and our guide especially did an amazing job and helped make our visit very memorable.

We stopped at one point and she began telling us a story of a little boy she had met and got to know quite well in the hospital. This little boy was like any other normal kid and was into basketball. He was playing basketball one day when he complained of a pain in his hip and had told his parents about it. They took him in to get checked, and they found out that the pain in his hip was a rare kind of cancer. This type of cancer had a 20% survival rate. Our guide told us that St. Jude took him under their wing and were able to get rid of the tumor, but this was the type of cancer that you could only get rid of for a short period of time and that it would eventually reappear somewhere else in the body. That's exactly what it did on this little guy. She said he was a real fighter though and fought it for 4 years until he passed away. To finish this story off though and the part that probably got me the most, was when she told us how before he died he wanted a CD made up for his mom of all there favorite seasonal songs so that she could play them back and think of him. I tell you I pretty much lost it at that point and my eyes filled up with tears. Here's a boy that's just been told his battle has come to an end and all he was worried about was taking care of his mom. When he passed away, he had no signs of cancer left in his body which was an absolute miracle, but what took him was the fact that his internal organs had been worked so hard from fighting off the cancer that they just decided to shut down all together. That little guy was and is a true example to all of us and I will never forget being told that story.

From there we went to a room where all the artists gathered together. We signed autographs to some of the patients and there families. Even there I was amazed by another incident. This young guy and his mom came up and got my autograph and we started talking. He had mentioned to me that he's conquered cancer and recovered from it and that St, Jude continually checks up on him. His mom was standing there and out of relief said that she's so thankful to St. Jude for everything they've done for her son and she started to cry as she completed her sentence. Her son who had the cancer put his arms around her to comfort her and tell her, mom everything is gonna be alright. I'm like WOW what a strong little guy. Well, I'm happy that I could share some of my memories with you of St. Jude and I hope that if you aren't already that you'll all become St. Jude supporters in the future. Thank you everyone and have a great evening. God Bless!

ag)