Brave Like Harper || September 2022

As Harper enters her tenth month of treatment (!!), she has been thrilled to work closely with her friends at The V Foundation, in support of their Pediatric Cancer Awareness Month campaign. You can find her smiling, freckled, face featured prominently on their campaign materials this month, either online or arriving in a mailbox near you!
During our collaboration, we've been shocked to learn how few resources exist for pediatric cancer research—only $.04 for every dollar raised is earmarked for kids. Thanks to the generosity of Mark and Cindy Pentecost, founders of It Works!, there is an opportunity to match up to $1,000,000 raised for pediatric cancer research this month through The V Foundation. We love a challenge, so we are committed to do our part with a relaunch of the Brave Like Harper campaign.
The past 10 months have been brutally difficult for Harper. As with all things, she is handling the second half of her frontline treatment beautifully and with grace despite setbacks, unexpected hospital stays, and just generally missing friends, and school, and normalcy. Soon, Harper will enter the maintenance phase of treatment. Here, she will have monthly clinic appointments (rather than weekly), and the medications and dosages are far less aggressive, which should set her up for a return to school, hopefully in November. She will be in treatment until winter of 2024.
Our elation at having gotten this far in treatment is tempered with sadness over the recent heartbreaking loss of a sweet friend of Harper's from our cancer community—an unimaginable loss. As we hold the family close in our hearts and prayers, we renew our commitment to do everything in our power to improve outcomes for all children with cancer.
As a parent, reflecting on the past year is difficult. I'm still not in a place to really talk about diagnosis day, the days preceding, and the days immediately following. But one thing that frequently surfaces is the memory of being told that Harper's leukemia had been identified as Acute Lymphoblastic Leukemia (ALL) - the 'good' kind of cancer. In fact, we were informed that, "if your child is going to get cancer, this is the one you want them to get." I've held those words close on many difficult treatment days and sleepless nights, and I acknowledge and recognize how fortunate we are for so many reasons. But...we need to do better, collectively, so that more parents can be comforted by the statistics provided to them at diagnosis. We need to ensure that there is adequate funding for pediatric cancer research to find cures for all kids who are diagnosed.
Won't you join us?