Back to Blogging

It has been over two months since I last posted a blog entry and a lot has happened in those last two months. I returned to work after Colleen’s death and an associated leave on September 22nd. On October 1st, my company laid off close to 450 people and I was one of them. Although we remain employed until 12/8, we were asked to leave the building that day and I have not been back since. It was a bit of a shock on our systems and for me, a bit of a grieving process started all over again. I had worked at Sony Ericsson for more than 9 years and made many close friends during that time. Although I expect to stay close to some of them, the economy will likely take many of them out of state and make maintaining relationships very difficult.

My “forced career transition” came with mixed emotions. I felt God pushing me into the direction service to ensure that children with cancer get the emotional care that they are now lacking but I was not sure what that looked like or when I would find the time to do it once I was back at work. I also knew that I no longer had the passion to do what I was doing before as it suddenly felt so meaningless. So now that I no longer had the job to worry about, I felt that God was giving me a big kick in the butt in that direction. But as Vince’s job at Nortel suddenly became threatened by layoffs, I worked on my resume and attended job fairs at the out placement agency that my company had provided us. This is when I realized that I was miserable and that unless I was forced to go back to the type of job I once had to keep food on the table, I could not do that type of work any longer. My decision was made. I was changing careers. Fortunately, Vince quickly got word that his job would be safe (at least for a while). Thank God.

So I have been spending all of my time researching, networking and speaking to doctors and psychologists all over the country. Learning how the best hospitals provide psychosocial care to kids with cancer. Psychosocial care is care that includes psychologists, social workers, child life specialists, and pastors. It is all of the people that care for the child’s mind, heart and spirit while the doctors and nurses care for the child’s body. But the true key is that everyone on the team, including the doctors and the nurses must care for the overall wellbeing of the child or it isn’t as effective. It is a complete culture change for most medical institutions. It was sad when I realized that some of the hospitals listed in the US News and World Report’s Top 20 Pediatric Cancer Hospitals don’t even have the resources to cover all of the components of psychosocial care, let alone succeed with the culture.

So what have I done with all this information? After talking to so many people and learning as much as I could about fundraising inside the hospital, I decided that the best thing to do was to fundraise outside of the hospital. Therefore, I have decided to establish a National Non Profit Organization and I have been working diligently on this effort. It is actually pretty complex. I have been reading, researching, meeting with people and making progress here and there. Since this entry is pretty long already, my next entry will tell you what I have done so far, there is a lot of work ahead of me and I need a lot of help. The exciting thing is that I am learning something completely new while still being able to capitalize on the skills that God gave me.

Be sure to subscribe to this new blog up in the left hand corner. Enter your email address, after you respond to the confirmation email you will get from feedburner, you will receive an email each time I update this blog. You can unsubscribe at any time if I start to bore you. I hope you stay along for the journey.

I would like to close by telling you one of the main things that keeps me working long hours on this project. On Saturday, May 24, 2008, Vince and I had to tell Colleen that we had to cancel her Make a Wish trip to swim with the dolphins. That we had to cancel her trip to Houston to participate in the phase 2 trial and that the doctors were going to stop treatment and send her home because her PET scan showed that the cancer had spread significantly and they did not know how else to treat it. That the only way for her body to be healed would be to go to heaven.

We had to tell Colleen that she was going to die soon…..

Do you know that the hospital did not have any type of psychological or spiritual support to offer us on that day or any other day that we were there? That makes me so sad. How many children are told that they have a life threatening illness or worse, that they are going to die and do not have the proper emotional support to help them cope with that?

To my knowledge, there is currently no other nonprofit organization in this country that is working to fund this issue. Colleen’s situation turned out one way but studies are showing that meeting psychosocial needs of patients with cancer can even improve outcomes and recovery. The hospitals are spending all of their money on research. Research to find treatments and cures for cancer. Treatments and cures that will hopefully keep our children alive. That priority seems correct to me.

This must be my purpose right now, and I have the passion to pursue it.

Take the first step in faith.
You don't have to see the whole staircase,
just take the first step.
~ Martin Luther King, Jr. ~