A request

There's a boy at Raegan's daycare who is only a month or so younger than Raegan. A couple months back they discovered a mass on his liver, and after further testing they determined that he has a rhabdoid tumor. If you click the link or google "rhabdoid tumor" you can learn more about it, but in a nutshell it's a highly aggressive malignant tumor that's very rare. It's believed to be genetically passed, and it only occurs in very young children. Apparently it's very resistant chemotherapy, and the prognosis is very poor.

I've known about the mass for several months now, but our child care provider updated me last week to let me know that this is pretty serious. At this point he's going to be at Angie's very infrequently because they are going back to Children's Mercy to do more chemo. If they still have no success, they will be going on to St. Jude's to look at other options.

My heart just breaks for this family right now. It really hits close to home for me, because (1)he's one of Raegan's "friends" at child care, and (2) he's pretty much the same age as Raegan. When Angie was telling me about the poor prognosis for this type of tumor, I was holding Raegan and I could feel myself just start to hold her tighter. I cannot even imagine how I would cope with something so horrifying. I honestly don't even want to imagine a scenario like this.

So all of this being said, please keep this family in your thoughts and prayers right now. If you would like to read about the efforts in the community to help the family, you can go here. If you are local and are reading this, please consider attending the auction and dinner that is being held in Brookville on Sunday, January 30th. If you read through the whole article I linked to above in this paragraph there's more information about the dinner. This family is facing a long uphill battle and even the seemingly smallest bit of help would be beneficial to them.