Thank you for supporting Alena and more than 300,000 kids worldwide who will be diagnosed with cancer this year. By sharing the gifts of your time, talent and money with the St. Baldrick’s Foundation, you're supporting research to give all kids with cancer a better chance for a cure. Alena was always athletic and very healthy, and rarely ever missed any school. She was pretty resilient and really doesn't complain too much, so it's hard to tell when things are really bothering her or a problem. And she loves to read, so she could sit for hours reading on the sofa and not exerting herself, so we didn't recognize that she wasn't able to get around as well as she normally had been. Then the last couple of months of 2012, it just seemed that she hasn't been quite herself - a little sluggish around the house, and definitely not her normal speedy, first-to-the-ball self in soccer during the Fall season, and just complaining of various aches and pains that she just never used to have. So we hit up a few doctors and tried to work through the issues, and it turns out that she was diagnosed with Acute Lymphoblastic Leukemia ("ALL") on December 7, 2012.