My name is Sophie and I have been battling an incurable, low-grade brain tumor called an Optic Pathway Glioma since I was 8 1/2 months old. Luckily these tumors have a 90% survival rate, but unluckily have an over 85% recurrence rate. Even worse, the only option for these tumors is chemotherapy. At first my mom Tracy and dad Josh dismissed cannabis as an option due to being stigmatized about the dangers around the plant. But mom and dad stopped and took a second look when celebrity talk show host and movie star Ricki Lake, and her documentary film partner Abby Epstein, were connected to them through social media. They told them about a film they were producing focused on kids using cannabis for cancer and our lives forever changed. After following our family for 6 years the documentary launched on Netflix in 2018 titled Weed the People. Soon after our initial cannabis journey began and my parents witnessed first-hand the powers of the plant, we knew we wanted to help more families like ours! So, we launched our 501c3 SavingSophie.org so we could help families with their financial hurdles, and a medical cannabis tincture company called CannaKids that operated for almost 8-years in California. CannaKids serviced patients of all ages within our state and consulted thousands of patients around the world working with qualified nurses and doctors to provide dosing and guidance. This led to our family being touted as trailblazers in the space of cannabis use for pediatrics, and we helped thousands of patients globally. Being able to help other kids like me gave me and my parents the strength to keep fighting!Despite the vast number of benefits from my medical cannabis use such as immune system boosting, seizure mitigation, unexpected tumor shrinkage in a tumor chemo can’t eradicate, to the lack of trauma I would endure to my face after major brain surgeries, my tumor kept coming back. We had to keep looking for my cure so the search continued.When my mom first met Dr. Anahid Jewett, who is one of the foremost thought leaders in cancer research in the field of Natural Killer Cells, I was 6 years old. When I required brain surgery to debulk my tumor mom and dad saw this as an opportunity to get my live tissue into mice for a personalized clinical trial. Dr. Jewett immediately offered to help after hearing my story. But it was when she learned that I had been taking medical cannabis since I was 9 months old, and my unexplainable healing, that she became even more interested in my case. When Dr. Jewett tested my Natural Killer Cells she discovered my immune function was functioning at impossibly high levels. Based on her 30+ years of research on patients with cancer they all had a malfunctioned NK Cell system, hence the presence of disease. She asked my mom to bring her more cancer patients using our CannaKids oils to test, and 29 cancer patients ranging from children to seniors were enrolled. The findings were groundbreaking and showed a direct link between Dr. Jewett's field of study and our passion for using cannabis as a medicine. What mom and Dr. Jewett discovered was even more incredible than what they found in the human patients. Not only was this cannabinoid rebooting the NK Cell system like we saw with the whole plant tinctures, but it was also attacking and killing cancer stem cells, the seeds of cancer from which cancer gives rise. Chemo and radiation cannot see these stem cells which is why we have such a big problem with cancer recurrence. But no one could understand why I had this tumor if I was otherwise so healthy.It wasn’t until I had to have a cyst drained from the tumor in my brain that Dr. Jewett discovered I had no NK Cells in my brain at all. There was some sort of blood brain barrier malfunction happening that I was born with. After receiving two infusions of my dad’s activated Natural Killer Cells in late 2021 my incurable tumor is now almost completely gone!! Twelve months off treatment my NK Cells are still functioning and fighting in my brain and continue to actively kill my disease. I continue to use cannabis daily to support my immune function and keep my NK Cells working. When my tumor is gone, which we now know how to get rid of, I will make history as the first patient to ever have an Optic Pathway Glioma eradicated with a treatment. My mom, Dr. Jewett and their partners are now working on bringing this therapy to market so other patients like me can get the help they need with a non-toxic treatment that fixes why you get cancer. But like many other researchers around the world, the money it costs is astronomical which makes bringing new therapies to market very difficult! It’s donors like you that help make these therapies possible. I hope you will join me in our continued fight to end this disease as we know it and help us kids get our lives back. Thank you!