Random Acts of Kindness
One Match Needed to Save a Mother’s Life: Updated
Jul 2nd
This story speaks for itself. It has been written by a husband in desperate need to help his wife. It is your chance to possibly save a life and if not Erica’s than someone that is in desperate need of a bone marrow transplant. Please consider donating today. Please post this on your Facebook page, tweet it or create your own post to spread this urgent call for help across the globe. Time is of the essence. I have added link at the bottom of places all over the world that you can give a sample to. It’s easy and urgent. Please donate today.
Erica, I love you my dear friend and my families prayers are with you every day.
Urgent Plea for Bone Marrow Donors to Help My Amazing Wife and Super-Mama – Erica
Erica Needs our Help to Survive
This is our urgent plea to you and to everyone that you know to help my amazing wife/our boys’ super-mama Erica find a suitable bone marrow transplant donor to help to save her life and to get her back home to our two young boys (ages 2 and 5). The picture is a recent shot of Erica in hospital.
On the afternoon of June 6, 2012 we were told that Erica had acute mylogenous leukemia (AML). She was immediately admitted to the Leukemia/BMT ward at Vancouver General Hospital (VGH) and a first round of chemo was started on June 8th. The first round lasted 7 days.
The intent of chemotherapy for AML (an acute form of blood cancer) is to wipe out all of the bad (leukemic) as well as the good cells in Erica’s bone marrow (where blood cells are formed and grow). What the doctors are looking for after the chemo treatment is for the bone marrow to be entirely clear of all cells, enabling Erica’s healthy cells to start growing again without the bad leukemic cells (essentially pressing a bone marrow ”reset” button). When the bone marrow is clear after chemo and the recovery period, the doctors call it ”remission”.
On June 21st, Erica had a bone marrow biopsy to determine if the 1st round of chemo had done its job. Instead of a clear marrow, what showed was about 10% “immature” cells. The concern of her doctors was that these were bad leukemic cells that were not destroyed by the chemo.
On June 28th, Erica had another bone marrow biopsy. We received the results the next day, on Friday, June 29th. These results showed clearly that the 1st round of chemo did not do its job. As of June 28th, the bad leukemic cells were estimated at 60% to 70% of her marrow. When this all started at the beginning of June, before any chemo treatments, her bad cells were estimated at 26%.
What does this mean? For starters, we were told that this result means that she is in the “high risk” designation for AML. Very high doses of different, harsher chemo drugs and a bone marrow transplant (BMT) are the urgent course of treatment.
They started what they call ”salvage” chemo on Saturday morning (June 30th). This aggressive round of chemo lasts 6 days, with a 4 to 6 week estimated ”recovery” period afterwards. We were also told that if this chemo does not do its job and put Erica’s leukemia into remission that there are no other courses of treatment for Erica at VGH. Assuming this harsher chemo does its job, Erica needs a BMT right away. The BMT has to occur shortly after this round of chemo, once remission is indicated (ie that the marrow is clear of the bad leukemic cells).
We need your urgent assistance with the bone marrow.
We need to find Erica as close a match as possible for her BMT from an un-related donor. There are international bone marrow donor registries that are being searched right now. As of Friday, the doctor indicated that a match had not been found yet. Further, if a match is found somewhere in the world, that donor has to confirm their consent.
Our window of time is very short to find a suitable, willing donor if the chemo does its job and the marrow is clear.
If you, or someone you know, agree to donate, and get on the donor registry very quickly, you may be able to assist Erica.
Please encourage friends, colleagues and family to sign up to the registry to donate their stem cells/bone marrow if they are able.
Please circulate and post this information and our plea everywhere you can.
For those of you in Canada, below is a link to the “One Match” bone marrow registry run by Canadian Blood Services (CBS). Information about the registry and forms to complete are on this site Canadian Blood Services. For those of you not in Canada please search to find the donor opportunities in your country of origin.
There is a process to follow. Once you sign up online, CBS contacts you in 8-10 business days and sends you a swab kit – you can contact your local CBS office to see if you can shorten this timeline and/or have the swab done at their location. Time is of the essence.
Also, if you, and/or anyone you know, are able to donate blood and/or platelets – this is also very important. Erica had a number of transfusions of platelets and haemoglobins in her first round of chemo and we anticipate there will be many more transfusions during this next chemo treatment. You never realize how important donating blood and platelets really is until you are receiving them.
Thank you for your thoughts, prayers, strength and support.
Thank you for spreading the word and circulating our plea.
Thank you for helping to bring Erica home.
Faith, Hope and Love
Team Harris
“Go Fighters Go”
(This is what our boys say to their mama to help her get her healthy “fighter” cells working again in her body)
United States: http://marrow.org/Join/
UK: http://www.nhsbt.nhs.uk/
Germany: http://www.zkrd.de/de/
Australia: http://www.abmdr.org.au/
New Zealand: http://www.nzblood.co.nz/
Czech: http://www.kostnidren.cz/
Belgium: http://www.transfusion.be/
Portugal: http://www.chsul.pt/
Ireland: www.giveblood.ie/
The Perfect Last Minute Gift Idea (and it’s free!): Gratitude
Dec 22nd
httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y_3BEwpv0dM
The holiday season is here. The stress of getting every detail completed before the big day is at a peak and many of us wonder if it will actually come together. The “to do” list is as long as your arm and Christmas seems more like work than joy, love, peace and happiness.
I hit a peak last night while wrapping Christmas gifts at 10:00 pm as the “to do” list in my head was replaying itself over and over. How was I possibly going to get everything done with a 4 year old bouncing off the walls and a new baby in my arms. My list seemed never ending: preparing the house, cooking Christmas dinner, last minute gift shopping…… I was driving myself into a holiday stress frenzy.
There is no one that should be more grateful than me this Christmas. I have been blessed with a beautiful baby boy that we just adopted weeks ago and I was forgetting to take the time every day just to be grateful. I needed perspective and I found it through this video of one person that is so selfless and giving I wanted to share it with you.
It reminded me what Christmas is really about – giving with your heart, being grateful for all you have and counting each blessing as it comes into your day. Narayana Krishnan the gentleman featured for his remarkable work in the video reminded me of just that – he reminded me to stop trying to make Christmas “Martha Stewart” perfect and reflect on my life for all it’s blessings.
I was inspired by Tina Sue this morning from Think Simple Now by a post entitled 20 Ways to Be Grateful. The article in worth a read and will inspire you to find the things in your life you are grateful for and how to share those thoughts with those around you. The greatest gift you could give this holiday season is not the perfectly wrapped present under the tree. Instead try looking your best friend, your brother, your mother. your neighbour, your children – even your pet right in the eye and telling them how grateful you are for them in your life. Here are some of my favourite quotes on being grateful this holiday season.
Gratitude Quotes
- The single greatest thing you can do to change your life today would be to start being grateful for what you have right now. The more grateful you are the more you will get. Oprah
- God gave you a gift of 86,400 seconds today. Have you used one to say “thank you?” ~William A. Ward
- Silent gratitude isn’t much use to anyone. ~G.B. Stern
- If the only prayer you said in your whole life was, “thank you,” that would suffice. ~Meister Eckhart
- You say grace before meals. All right. But I say grace before the concert and the opera, and grace before the play and pantomime, and grace before I open a book, and grace before sketching, painting, swimming, fencing, boxing, walking, playing, dancing and grace before I dip the pen in the ink. ~G.K. Chesterton
- If you want to turn your life around, try thankfulness. It will change your life mightily. ~Gerald Good
- Gratitude is the music of the heart, when its chords are swept by the breeze of kindness. ~Author Unknown
- Feeling gratitude and not expressing it is like wrapping a present and not giving it. ~William Arthur Ward
I am so grateful for everyone that has supported 365give this past year. You have inspired me, made me laugh, supported me when I needed it the most and encouraged me to keep giving even on the days I didn’t think I had it in me. I feel honoured to know you – my Twitter friends, my readers, my Facebook friends and those who have just stumbled upon my site. Giving is my passion and being grateful is something I will remember to do every day of the year.I wish you a wonderful holiday season filled with love, happiness, peace and gratitude.
Jacqueline
Founder 365give
Top 10 Good Deeds for The Holiday Season
Dec 19th
‘Tis the season to give but not all of us have the means to make cash donations to our favourite charities. What if instead of giving cash you did one “good deed” every day between now and Christmas. My friend Alex of @Good_Indeed on Twitter has done just that – committed to one good deed every day for 365 days, tweeting his good deed each day.
He is on day 317 of 365 days of good deeds and 365give got his very personal Top 10 favourite ways to inspire you to “do good” every day.
Guest Post by Alex D @Good_Indeed
One day listening to yet another account of alarming news on the radio, I began to wonder what kind of effect this constant bombardment of negativity may have on all of us. How could we be positive when there is so much pessimism in the world?
How could we be hopeful when the picture painted in front us is so dark?
For some reason, at that very instant, I felt the need to give people more positive examples to counteract the negativity in our daily lives. That’s how my 1-year “A Deed A Day” challenge came to be. I have always been a strong believer in the big impact of small actions.
- The same way a dirty look or a disrespectful gesture can spoil our day and contribute to our bitterness;
- The same way a smile or a helping hand can make a world of a difference and help us get closer to one another.
I didn’t know how far I would go with this, but I must admit that giving is quite addictive.
The more you give, the more you seem to receive and so on…
Everyone should try it. Who knows, someday there may be more good deeds than bad ones on the evening news.
- Top 10 list of Good Deeds
- Day 3: Collected used batteries from my neighbours for proper recycling. Got to know them better and helped the environment. Double bonus!
- Day16: Now save energy by lowering the thermostat & unpluging evil phantom loads before I go out or go to sleep.
- Day38: Volunteered to teach in friend’s high school. Spoke about opportunities in the solar industry. Great group of kids!
- Day49: Sent nice greeting card to a stranger I randomly picked out of the phone book. #RandomActsOfKindess
- Day126: Performed at concert organized by the Harold Napper School to raise funds for Japanese disaster victims.
- Day155: Traded our Toyota for the pleasures of a nice BMW (Bus, Metro, Walk). It’s the beginning of a new, greener lifestyle.
- Day175: Prevented teenager from hurting his girlfriend. We can all help stop violence in teen couples…It starts with education.
- Day283: Bought coffee for the people behind me at the drive through. The look on their faces was priceless.
- Day287: Had long chat with a homeless man and bought him lunch. Poor guy lived from pay-check to pay-check. Lost it all when he lost his job.
- Day301: Raised $440 in 36 hours for children without a voice, as part of Free the Children’s Vow of Silence campaign.
What Are you Saying?