| Hi All, Some of you may have noticed (and probably many more of you have not) that I've been pretty well absent from forum life for the past year, as witnessed by my total 7 posts in the past 12 months. The reasons for this are threefold. As background, some of you may remember this post from a few years ago of my daughter when I was washing the Z one day: La-Z-Link On December 14, 2006 (almost exactly a year ago) my daughter who was 2 1/2 years old at the time was diagnosed with Acute Lymphoblastic Leukemia. This certainly came as a shock to us and we spent the next 9 days in the hospital with her undergoing her first surgery and chemotherapy. The scariest thing I have ever had to deal with in my life was watching my toddler being anesthetized and sent into an O.R. We were able to leave the hospital on Christmas Eve and got to spend Christmas Day at home. Unfortunately she developed a fever shortly after and we were right back in the hospital for another 10 days. The first half of 2007 continued in a similar fashion as her treatment required frequent short hospitalizations which was quite stressful as #2 was waiting in the wings and I had to balance work, travel, and overnight hospital stays throughout that time with my pregnant wife. 
Trinity in the hospital shortly after her diagnosis
If you are not aware (as we certainly weren't) leukemia is cancer of the blood. Essentially a single blood cell mutates and fails to mature. It then replicates its mutated self out of control and ultimately squeezes out all of the good blood cells (red, white, and platelets). It is an extremely aggressive disease. Doctors told us that the very first cell went bad probably 3 weeks before she was diagnosed. At the time of diagnosis she had roughly 100 billion leukemia cells in her blood. Left unchecked she would not have made it to New Year's 2007. From a disease standpoint, all of her indicators were, and continue to be, extremely positive and she is in a roughly 90% range to be completely cured. However to do this, her chemotherapy treatment must continue for a total of 2 1/2 years until she is 5 years old. In January, after learning more about blood cancers in general and seeing all the other sick kids in the oncology ward of Cook Children's Hospital I started looking around to see what I could do to help. I found the Team in Training arm of the Leukemia & Lymphoma Society and joined the team to run a marathon in April and raise money for research. I had never been much of a runner and certainly had never run anything more than 3 or 4 miles. With a lot of motivation and determination however I trained up in under 3 months and successfully ran the Big D Marathon in Dallas on April 1. More importantly I was able to raise over $7,200 for the society (over 400% of my goal), the majority of which went 100% to research and family services. On Memorial Day we welcomed our son, Lex Grayson, into the world. I had every intention of making a proud papa post back then but just never had the time to do so. He's now 6 months old and growing like a weed, as they always do. Through the summer we were focused on taking care of a brand new baby and continuing our daughter's treatment. While her news had always been consistently positive and almost made us forget how serious these cancers can be, we had a rude reality check in July and August. During those months, 4 of the children whom we had seen and our daughter had played with at the clinic lost their fights. One as old as 19, one as young as 4. The fact that the success rate is 90% on some of these cancers is of little consolation to their families and still isn't good enough. Which brings me to the main point of this post. I am starting training (properly this time) for marathon #2, also the Big D in Dallas, to be run on April 8, 2008. My goals are two-fold. Primarily, I want to raise as much money as possible to continue to fund research into cures for leukemia and lymphoma. I have every intention of blowing away the number that I raised last year and would like to ask for your help in doing so. Secondarily I'm attempting to also blow away my previous time in the marathon and break under a 4 hour run. The Leukemia & Lymphoma Society has been dedicated to raising awareness of and funding research for blood cancers since the late 40's. Team in Training was founded in 1988 to help motivated people get in shape (or stay in shape) while raising money for this great cause. If you are looking to finish out 2007 with some charitable giving or want to start out 2008 in that fashion, I would greatly appreciate your support of this important research if you are able to do so. You can donate through my Team In Training page. All donations are 100% tax deductible and you will get a confirmation email receipt as soon as you donate. I thank you, and my daughter thanks you, in advance for your support. To make this Z related, I do still have my Z. It's been spending most of its time cooped up in the garage unfortunately although I have managed to put a few hundred miles on it this past year. :) Here is Trinity today (OK, 2 weeks ago) along with new baby brother Lex
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Charitable Fundraiser (and my one year retrospective) - 
20:08:33 12/28/07
