As someone who was impacted by childhood cancer I am getting ready to volunteer for St. Baldrick's Foundation. St Baldrick's is an amazing organization that I wished was around when I was a youngster. St. Baldrick's host events that involve shaving of heads to raise money for childhood cancer research! Did you know that kids' cancers are different from adult cancers? It's true. And childhood cancer research is extremely underfunded. So we decided to do something about it by raising money for cures. At the age of nine, I found out that I had Astrocytoma, luckily I was considered to have Pilocytic Astrocytoma which is considered the lowest grade. It took a biopsy to discover this, though, and that meant at the age of nine, I would lose half my hair. At the age of 16 at one of my checkups I was joking with my grandma while waiting for the doctor and told her that if the tumors were to grow and they had to do another surgery that I was shaving my entire head this time, I refused to look like I did when I was nine. At that appointment, I got news that the main tumor had in fact grown and they needed to do another biopsy. As I sat there with tears in my eyes the doctor assured me that things had been improved and that I would not have to shave my head, in fact, they would only need to drill a little hole in my head and would complete the surgery through that little hole! When we found out I had Astrocytoma, my doctor had suggested sending me to Camp Friendship, a weeklong camp for kids with or who once had cancer. I went to this camp for 7 years and met some of my best friends there. I also learned that not everybody was as lucky as I was. We had kids that were amputees, one's that would come to camp and then go to the hospital to receive treatment, kids with ports that had to be cleaned constantly, and kids that were so sick that you were scared for them as another child. One of the girls in my cabin of 7-12 girls was Amanda Collins. Amanda had childhood leukemia, every year we weren't sure what hair style Amanda was going to have. Some years she had a chic short shaved head, other years she was completely bald and yet there were years that she had a full head of gorgeous red curly hair. Although we were all great friends, Amanda was one of my closest. She and I would hang out during the year between camp, the last time I saw Amanda was when I was 17. She was fighting yet another bout of cancer and I had made her a "chemo blanket" a blanket made from the handkerchiefs that we all came so accustomed to wearing. She was tired but still stayed awake to talk with me and show me how excited she was that her sibling was getting married. Amanda passed away later that summer, she was 18. Amanda would never have a wedding or meet her nieces and nephews that would later be born, she would never get to live out her dreams. When she passed she had been through so many different treatments that she had that green chemo color, St. Baldrick's goal is to provide support to find ways to treat just children. We are now finding that the cancer kids have shouldn't be treated the same way as adults. We are finding that children need different dosages or completely different methods of treatment. St. Baldrick's is all about fighting those childhood cancers that have affected so many of us.
