Nutrition and wellness guide
Check out this great nutrition and wellness guide for children with cancer and their families, put together by Gabi from Jacob’s Heart and Stanford’s children’s hospital.
Author: hope
3rd edition: “How Sunshine Returned to Joyland”
See this page for the latest on our interactive edition of the children’s book with activities, rhymes and artwork to help children cheer up and stay positive amidst challenges.
An evening of wishes
Make a wish foundation grants life-changing wishes for children with critical illnesses. When a wish comes true, it creates strength, hope and transformation.
We had a great time at the evening of wishes gala! Our kid’s wish was to write a children’s book. Make a wish helped her work with a real children’s book author, Shirin Bridges. Kiddo also met and interviewed Annie Barrows, the famous author of Ivy and Bean children’s book series! She visited Chronicle books at San Francisco and learned about how a book gets published (from the initial submission, to design, editing, printing etc). At the gala, she was asked to read her upcoming book on stage. Apu was initially nervous, but was pleasantly surprised upon hearing the applause and support from the audience. She said it was one of the best feelings she ever had! Thank you so much Make a wish!! 💕🥰
Please reach out to the child life specialist or social worker at your hospital if you’d like to connect with Make a wish for your kid.
Student of the year grand finale, LLS
It was an amazing night of celebration at the Student of the year (SOY) grand finale by Leukemia and Lymphoma Society (LLS). About a dozen high school teams from the Bay area had been working very hard since Jan this year to fundraise for finding better cures for blood cancers, and…
these teenagers raised a whopping $246,000 towards the noble cause!!
We’d like to thank the SOY team for choosing Apu as the honored child hero for the event. As someone who’s shy, she was nervous to go up on stage. Thanks to the encouragement and support from the audience, she soon felt comfortable — even gave a short speech on stage — and was delighted to give the awards to the winning teams.
We met and spoke with many students and their families. So inspiring to see the energy and passion of these high school kids towards helping the community! Way to go kids!! 👏👏👍
Light the Night 2019
Huge thanks to all our friends who joined us yesterday at Light the Night, and to everyone that contributed to the cause!
Apu was called on stage to raise the white lantern in support of all survivors and patients. As she raised her lantern, people raised thousands of colorful lanterns to light the night sky, for a celebration of hope and strength, bringing light to the darkness of cancer. It was heartwarming beyond words to see the love and support from such a large community of patients, survivors and supporters… One of those beautiful moments where nothing else mattered — no race, gender, age etc… What an elegant celebration of the strength of the human spirit!
Personally, we felt humbled and grateful that Apu is well enough to celebrate her first chemo-free birthday in 4 years in such a positive and meaningful atmosphere, as part of Light the Night. She and her friends had a blast! They dressed up in their Halloween costumes and had fun with various activities such as face painting, bouncy slides, and balloon animals.
And a huge shout out to all our supporters! Thanks to your generous donations, our team “Brave Kids Fight Cancer” ranked second and raised ~$25000 to help the Leukemia and Lymphoma Society find better cures to end cancer. You’re all awesome – thank you for the continued support, prayers and wishes!!
2nd edition: “How Sunshine Returned to Joyland”
As you may know, towards the end of the first year of our kid’s cancer treatment, we’d converted her artwork during treatment into a children’s book “How Sunshine Returned to Joyland” to inspire kids to stay strong and never give up. The book response was great, and we were able to fundraise over $10k towards charity through book sales. Thank you everyone for your generosity!
The first edition was a bit rushed and verbose (we somehow managed to self publish it amidst her ongoing treatment). We are delighted to let you know that we recently released a second edition of the book. The new book is shorter, packed with artwork and funny rhymes. We hope you enjoy it!
The new edition is now available for purchase at Amazon. Please help us raise childhood cancer awareness by sharing this book with your friends and colleagues.
Below are some excerpts from the new edition. Hope you enjoy reading it!
Happy 2019!
Goodbye 2018, and hello 2019! For us, this holiday season was a big relief as it marked the end of ~2.5 year long treatment/protocol for our kid’s high risk B-cell leukemia. She is recovering well, and we pray that she is permanently cured.
We feel grateful and blessed to have made it so far. Here’s a video to capture the positive memories and small joys and lessons along this journey.
Wishing everyone a happy 2019 filled with strength, joy and hope! Continuing to pray for all families.
‘Tis the season of joy and giving
Two years ago, we were stuck in the hospital around the holidays. Every random act of kindness went a long way in helping our kid smile. So this holiday season, we decided to help cheer up kids at the oncology clinic and the pediatric unit at the hospital by giving back and distributing gifts. Just simple stuff — sing-along-toys and blankets for young ones; activity kits, games, art set and coloring books for older ones. Knock, knock joke books for all ages (beware nurses and doctors, you can’t enter unless you answer it right!). For silly time, there was emoji-mania — ornaments filled with emoji plush toy, emoji bracelet, emoji led rings, and an emoji stress ball.
We met kids of different age groups. The smile on their faces made our day! A strange, unexplainable joy filled our hearts — couldn’t have had a better way to celebrate Apu’s end of treatment!
Once again, many thanks to everyone that has helped us come so far in this journey. For all those still in treatment, stay strong and hang in there! Sending our best wishes and prayers for everyone to feel better soon.
End of treatment!
Looking back, the last 2.5 years has been a crazy, long journey — 60+ days of hospitalization, 2500+ chemo pills, 2300+ ml of antibiotics, 1400+ ml of steroids, 20+ spinal taps, 100+ clinic visits, numerous pokes / blood tests / transfusions…
SO SO glad that this is finally over!! Kid’s port came out recently. You can imagine our surprise when we saw the Deathly hallows symbol drawn on her chest bandage. What a sweet gesture by the surgeon, who got to know before the surgery that our kid likes Harry Potter! 💕💖
Many thanks to all our nurses, doctors, staff at Kaiser, friends, family and well wishers for your continued support throughout this period. We hope and pray that Apu stays cancer free, and has a healthy and happy rest of her life!
Fantasy Flight by Cops Care Cancer Foundation
We recently learned about the Fantasy Flight event from a friend. Cops from Bay area did an amazing job at organizing this annual event for kids fighting cancer. Kids and their families were treated to a VIP experience of riding in a motorcade of 50+ cop cars on 101 freeway (yep, with traffic stopped!), and kids operated the sirens. The icing on the cake was watching Santa arrive in a helicopter to distribute gifts to the kids!
The day was packed with fun games and events, including cops dressed as Superheroes, Star wars characters, and in various other costumes. HUGE THANKS to cops from San Jose, Santa Clara, Sunnyvale, Fremont, Los Altos and nearby areas for creating beautiful memories for children in treatment!