Cancer Sucks

I remember just a few short years ago when our pastor asked anyone in the congregation whose life had been immediately impacted by cancer to stand. As I watched person after person stand, I felt so much compassion for them – and so much gratitude that it had somehow passed us by. Little did I know that nearly no one gets a free pass when it comes to cancer. It’s really just a waiting game until you’re the one anxiously waiting for results. Sometimes the outcome is heartbreaking, like when I lost my father in March to lung cancer – the type cause by “environmental factors” that no one can quite pinpoint. But sometimes you get a miracle, like when our daughter Alex survived brain cancer. Alex was a 22-year-old in her last semester of college when she just felt “yucky” at her internship. When a week of feeling under the weather turned into a full blown seizure we knew it was more than typical college stress. What we weren’t expecting was a name we learned to rattle off our tongues – Stage III anaplastic astrocytoma. It’s basically when you look at a scan of your child’s brain and see that a golf ball has taken up residence. Alex was lucky – she had access to some of the world’s best neurosurgeons, radiologists, oncologists, and neurologists. They were, and are, incredible human beings who sacrificed so much to save her life. They are heroes in our family. Unfortunately, not everyone has the health care that we had, not everyone lives in a city like Atlanta with top notch hospitals, and not everyone gets to be called a survivor. That’s why we need to wipe out cancer. Because cancer just sucks.

In October we will donate 100% of the profits from all “Cancer Sucks” PEARL X logo’d balls to cancer research. Alex is our accountant now, so she’ll be writing the check herself…right before she welcomes her second baby boy in November.