Recently I posted an update on my Generosity page about Dave's long road to recovery from his osteosarcoma. I imagine everyone reading this will know that in January of this year I shaved my head to raise funds to help pay for state-of-the-art medical treatment for Dave, involving removing the cancerous bone in his leg and replacing it with an electromagnetic telescopic implant that will grow with him as he gets older, both enabling him to walk and removing the need for any further invasive surgeries.
But as with all surgeries, state-of-the-art or not, there is risk, and following a minor corrective procedure to realign the implant, Dave contracted an infection in his leg. That infection proved to be resistant to most antibiotics, and so Dave has spent the last week in hospital on IV antibiotics in order to save his leg from this infection. He will need to take these drugs for at least six weeks. Those antibiotics cost $200 a day. Two hundred dollars, every single day, for another five weeks, is a lot of money, even before you factor in the doctors' bills, the hospital stay...
We were hugely blessed to have been able to raise a very substantial amount of money through the enormous generosity shown by people during the original fundraiser. Those funds covered the cost of the implant, the surgery, Dave's second series of chemotherapy, and part of the cost of the corrective procedure. But that cash is long gone, and we are struggling to be able to meet the financial demands of Dave's treatment regime.
Which brings me to the new challenge.
Originally when I realised I was going to need to try and raise money somehow, I had contemplated the idea of seeking sponsorship to do a run - specifically, the Angkor Wat half marathon last December, which I had registered for a couple of months previously. But when I thought about it, this seemed rather like asking people to sponsor me to go on holiday - nobody was going to pony up to see me run a distance that I could do on a Sunday before brunch. I needed something more, something shocking, something challenging, so I wrote off the idea of running, and I shaved my head instead.
But I can't shave my head again (or at least it wouldn't have the same impact second time around!), and the more I thought about it the more I realised that I had approached the problem in the wrong way. The problem was not running per se - the problem was that me running a half marathon was not a challenge. So I needed to find a running target that was actually difficult.
Which is why I will be running 500km over the month of July. Yep, five hundred kilometers in 31 days. Does that sound like enough of a challenge? It's nearly 12 marathons, 23.5 half marathons, almost 17 kilometers a day for 31 days, and I will be doing it while also doing a full time job. I will have to give up red wine, seriously compromise the servicing of my West Wing addiction, and get up at 6am every day. It will be horrible. But if it enables me to help pay for Dave to get better, it will be worth it - as going bald was worth it, five months ago.
So, how can you help? Well, there is an obvious way: please sponsor me! Lump sum, an amount per kilometer completed, whatever - everything helps, however small the amount may be. You can do this through the Generosity site or if you'd like to send money by another method just drop me a message through Google+ and we can figure it out. One thing I would say though is that if you do want to donate, then the sooner the better - we are facing an urgent cash crunch as the medicine is needed right now and we can't allow a gap in treatment.
I am aware, though, that I am asking the same people who were so generous the first time round to sponsor me again. So if you can't give cash, there is another way you can help: lace up your own running shoes, think about what distance YOU can do in July, and ask your friends to sponsor you. Not a runner? Even better! Everyone has to start somewhere, so commit to 10k, or 20. If you can't run, jog, and if you can't jog, walk. Can you get a team together, from your work, from your gym, from your kid's school, from anywhere? Join up, get off the sofa, and run with me, wherever you are in the world: let's create a global community of people running together to help this kid beat the crappy hand he has been dealt. And if you're in Singapore, come keep me company and run with me - it's gonna be pretty boring spending fifty hours over next month pounding the streets on my own. Every Friday I will post on here and on the page I will be setting up on Facebook where and when I will be running over the weekend, so please come along and cheer me up!
If there's one thing I learned from January's experience, it's the amazing power of human beings acting collectively for a cause. One person contributing ten dollars may not seem like a lot; a hundred people doing that begins to become a big deal, a game-changing deal; for Dave (and, to be completely honest, for me), a life-changing deal. So, can you give me ten dollars? Can you give me ten kilometers? Can you get your friends to sponsor you a hundred, two hundred dollars, for those ten kilometers, for twenty? Whatever you can give, and whatever you can get people to give, will make a difference to our effort to help Dave recover and to rebuild his life. And the more people we can involve in this effort, the bigger the difference we will make.
With heartfelt thanks from all of us for your generosity to date, and hopefully to come.
Isabelle xx
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