The Marks family and 13 other families found healing and comfort at Camp Kindle last year during our 2014 Bereaved Family Camp. The first of its kind in Alberta, Bereaved Family Camp has since become an annual weekend gathering.

Although many bereaved families attend Family Camp and their children attend summer camp, Bereaved Family Camp offers something especially meaningful for families on a different journey.

“The best thing we can do for families who have lost a child is to connect them with a supportive community that understands their experience better than anyone,” says Kelly Kerr of Kids Cancer Care. “This Family Camp is one weekend in an entire year, where they don’t have to explain anything or edit themselves. We set up camp so each individual and each family can get what they need from the weekend. They can grieve, they can remember, they can share stories, they can find support from each other or spend quiet time alone. They can still laugh and have fun, they can hope for good things to come. We want them to know that they are still part of this community, there is always a place for them.”

Tim’s and Marggie’s daughter Larissa was only nine months old when she was diagnosed with glioblastoma, an aggressive brain cancer rarely found in children that is usually terminal. After a lengthy brain surgery, Larissa fell into a coma and eventually passed away just weeks before her first birthday. Although Tim and Marggie would give anything to have their little girl back, they are grateful she did not suffer long.

“The grief never ends,” says Larissa’s mother Marggie, “but you come to terms with it eventually. It took five years to finally feel more stable. Danica was my reason for coping. You can’t shut yourself away in your bedroom and cry forever when you have a two-year-old who needs you. Danica gave me my reason for living. She gave me my life.”

Keeping the memory of Larissa alive is important to Tim and Marggie. “One of the reasons we connected with Kids Cancer Care is because we wanted our children to remember their sister, to really understand and to cope. These camps have helped them to grow and to become more compassionate people.”

Over the weekend, families enjoyed the thrill of the challenge course, nature hikes, reflective art projects and making bannock over a campfire.

The weekend also marked the opening of the Reflection Garden with a First Nation’s drumming circle. “We loved the Reflection Garden and the drumming circle,” said Marggie. “For me, it was deeply moving to hear the Elder compare our journey to that of God and his son, Christ. I had never thought of it in that way and it gave me peace. How gracious and generous it was for a spiritual leader from another faith to make those connections—in a way that would be meaningful to us.”

Thank you. You’ve given parents, grieving the loss of their young, a safe space to honour their child.

In December 2013, Jenn Rodriguez noticed a large lump on the right side of her six-year-old son’s neck. Alarmed, she took a photo of Mason’s neck and immediately sent it by text to her husband Diego. But Jenn and Diego would soon discover that the lump, which had caused so much terror in them, would barely cause a ripple at the hospital for quite some time.

Mason’s tests kept coming back normal, so the doctors concluded that he simply had an enlarged lymph node. After three trips to the emergency, a course of antibiotics and two trips to an ear, nose and throat specialist, Mason finally underwent surgery in the New Year to remove the lump.

After surgery, they were able to perform a freeze screen test and later confirmed it was a lymphoma cancer. A series of tests, including a bone marrow, CT scan, ultrasounds, X-rays, blood work and a lymph node biopsy, revealed that Mason had stage four Burkitt’s lymphoma.

“Telling a six-year-old he has cancer was an out of body experience for me,” says Jenn. “He is six. How is this possible?  Our world spiralled out of control.”

“We jumped on the computer and Googled Burkitt’s,” says Jenn. “Pictures for Burkitt’s are shocking.  Researching what our son had and what the treatment might entail kept us up all night. We cried harder and longer that night than any other time. Not our son, not our six year old baby.”

But the next morning brought a new determination in the Rodriguez family. They had to win this fight. And with that determination, Team Mason was born.

Mason went through five rounds of extremely intense chemotherapy, each round bringing new challenges. Mason never gave up. “He didn’t want to do it for one more second, but he never quit,” says Jenn. “He was amazing. He is the bravest person I know.”

Mason spent 60 nights at the Alberta Children’s Hospital. Jenn stayed at the hospital, while Diego stayed home with Mason’s older brother Bennett. Each morning, when Diego dropped Bennett off for school, they would take a picture and send it to Jenn and Mason. Jenn and Mason would then send a photo back. This was their new normal, their new way of being a family together.

On May 14th, they heard the magical words every oncology family dreams of hearing: “Your child is in remission.”

After his broviac line was removed, Mason was able to lay down in a bath for the first time in months. “He lay in that tub until the water went cold,” says Jenn. “I will never forget the look on his face that day. There was so much peace.”

And so many mustaches.

Unlike his brother Bennett, Mason has never enjoyed being the centre of attention, so when he started school with a bald head in September, he started wearing mock mustaches.

“It is his way of having people focus on something other than how he looks or how great his hair was growing back,” says Jenn.

Although Mason has a full head of hair now, he still wears a mustache every now and then.

“He’ll go to the bathroom and pull a mustache from his pocket and return to class with it on,” says his father Diego. “It’s really funny because sometimes he forgets he’s wearing it, so when I pick him up from school, he’ll come out with a mustache on and all the other parents start laughing. It’s become Mason’s thing.”

Although the support at school has been incredible, there is a place where Mason feels totally accepted with or without a mustache. That place is Camp Kindle.

“The biggest highlight of the year for the kids was camp,” says Diego. “They can’t stop talking about it.”

“Camp was truly a turning point for Mason,” says Jenn. “He came back home as the kid we used to know. He learned to have fun again at camp. When we picked them up, they didn’t want to come home with us. They wanted to have more time at camp. They absolutely loved every second of Camp Kindle and they cannot wait to go back next year.”

“Kids Cancer Care is the most incredible organization I have ever encountered,” says Jenn. “The support that they give families going through this unbelievable experience is above and beyond anything I ever expected. We never would have met the people we have and created a little community here if we were not part of an organization like Kids Cancer Care.”

Every year, you give more than 700 kids like Mason a place where they belong—bald heads, battle scars, mucho moustaches and all—without having to explain a thing. 

The containers of nutritious home-cooked meals could not have arrived sooner for Liam and his family.

Sarah Bachelder had just given birth to her second son Isaiah, when her two-year-old son Liam started presenting with a fever that wouldn’t quit. Two weeks after his baby brother was born, Liam was diagnosed with acute lymphoblastic leukemia.

And, if that wasn’t enough, Mom went in for surgery two months later. “It was only day surgery,” says Sarah, “but I couldn’t pick up the kids at all for a week, so Jonathan had to go to the hospital on his own.”

Working fulltime and going to school fulltime, Jonathan managed to spend nights at the hospital with Liam, while Mom tried to hold things together at home with the newborn.

“It was really a crazy year,” recalls Sarah. “Having all that food in the freezer helped take off some of the pressure. We’re pretty independent, but we knew we couldn’t do this on our own, so we took all the help we could get. We are so grateful for all the support.”

Thanks to our volunteer cooks, the Bachelders received all their favourites—Mexican, Indian, Thai and Vietnamese dishes, along with lots of healthy snack foods. They also received freshly baked goods from COBS Bread on 130^th Avenue and gift certificates to Famoso Neapolitan Pizzeria in Country Hills—two local companies that actively participate in our Cooking and Caring program.

We’re grateful to our volunteer cooks and generous community partners for breaking bread with our families. When we cook, we don’t simply toss in ingredients; we stir and savour, sauté and season, simmer and sample with care and attention. As Cesar Chavez, the Latino American civil rights activist, said, “The people who give you their food, give you their heart.”

Thank you for Cooking and Caring! You helped provide 343 home-cooked meals for families in the throes of childhood cancer. Your nutritious home-cooked meals helped families facing childhood cancer to eat well and spend time together without ever having to worry about what’s for dinner. 

Ethan Olmats was diagnosed with infant acute lymphoblastic leukemia (I-ALL) when he was three months old. There wasn’t a day in his life when he wasn’t sick. In July 2007, after sharing a big smile with his uncle Paul, who had travelled great distances to meet him for the first time, Ethan passed away.

Although Ethan’s life was painfully short, he left an imprint in the lives and in the hearts of his family. His Beads of Courage remain a testament to his joyful presence and courageous spirit.

Ethan’s beads are exceptionally long because he was very sick and his family lovingly recorded each and every step.

Imagine a string of colourful beads—2,561 beads, pink, blue, black, red—piled high on your kitchen table. Now imagine stretching them out—68.5 feet of colour running the perimeter of your kitchen. Five times. Now consider that each tiny bead represents a medical procedure.

Ethan would want you to know that his string of beads was long because there were also a lot of happy moments on his journey—a trip to Bowness Park, visits from his big brothers, his first birthday.

“All the pink ones are Ethan’s visitors,” says Ethan’s older brother Kevin.

“And the large pink one with the red polka dots is a special one,” says Ethan’s mother Colleen. “That’s the first time his big brothers visited him in the ICU at the hospital.”

The bead Colleen points to appears early in Ethan’s Beads of Courage because Erik and Colleen Olmats made a point of including the older boys in the journey. Juggling busy work schedules and extracurricular activities, Colleen and Erik struggled to keep life normal for Ethan’s older brothers, Cameron and Kevin.

It’s an approach they adopted early and maintain today—even in their grief. The Olmats are a loving family that openly talks about Ethan and the loss of his joyful presence.

The beads help the Olmats regain perspective: “When I’m feeling down,” says Erik, “I just look at these beads and see what Ethan went through and I know I have nothing to feel badly about.”

The beads also help the older boys to understand. When Ethan was on treatment, Kevin brought the beads to school to show his classmates and explain what his baby brother was going through. And Colleen adds, “When Cameron was old enough, the beads were there to help him understand too.”

Thank you. You helped dignify a child’s cancer experience by making Beads of Courage possible. 

As an orthopaedic cancer surgeon and EXpAT researcher, specializing in the diagnosis and management of malignant pediatric bone cancer, Dr. Monument is extremely interested in how bone cancers metastasize (spread) to the lung.

Using high-end genetic sequencing and imaging technology, Dr. Monument’s research group is studying different human bone cancer models to understand and characterize the common genetic and molecular factors responsible for lung metastases. He and his research team are employing a unique strategy to simultaneously assess the molecular changes that take place in tumour cells and in host lung tissue during the evolution of lung metastases.

Identifying these crucial pro-metastatic pathways is vital to recognizing high-risk patients earlier, while also paving the way for new, targeted therapies. Given the poor survival rate for sarcoma patients who develop lung metastases, new strategies to prevent and impede lung metastases are essential to save young lives.

With your support, in 2014, we completed our $2.5-million commitment to the ExpAT program.

Dr. Monument is an orthopaedic oncology surgeon in the Department of Surgery at the University of Calgary’s Cumming School of Medicine. To learn more about the research initiatives of the Experimental and Applied Therapeutics program at the University of Calgary click here.

While other kids were goofing around outdoors, two-year-old Luca spent hours at the computer, exploring sites on volcanoes. When, as a four-year-old, he started talking about going to university, Luca’s mother Amber knew something was up. “He doesn’t care about sports. He doesn’t care about anything, but science. That’s all he wants to do,” she says. So Amber and her husband Ernie enrolled Luca in a school for gifted children.

Just as they were getting used to the idea of sending Luca to a gifted school, everything changed. After months of unexplained headaches and nausea, Luca was diagnosed with a brain tumour that required an intense treatment regimen.

“It’s horrifying what brain cancer patients go through,” says Amber. After an eight-hour surgery that didn’t go well, “Luca spent the next week in intensive care in a kind of pain I didn’t even know existed,” says Amber. He later underwent three stem cell transplants that required several rounds of high-dose chemotherapy. “He threw up all day, every day, for seven months.”

What’s more, Luca would soon relapse and have to go through it all over again.

“His three-month scan was perfect,” says Amber. “His six-month scan, not a spot. His nine-month scan, two tumours. So we started again, from the very beginning.”

Amber assumed they would abandon their plans for a gifted school after Luca’s first round with cancer. But he wanted it so badly, “I really want this mommy,” he told her. So Amber and Ernie decided to stick with the original plan.

But learning is now difficult for Luca and he is struggling at school. After the surgery, the high dose chemo and radiation, Luca is no longer the same child. “He’s changed so much because of what the treatment has done to his brain,” says Amber. “He’s so little and he’s completely heartbroken.” Mom and Dad are now doing everything in their power to access funding to hire a teaching aid for him. It has not been easy.