Baytown Relay for Life

The Storm Troopers and a couple of Jedi made an appearance at the Baytown TX Relay for Life which is the largest Relay in Texas.

The retinoblastoma girls. Gracie you all know on the left, is standing beside Leah and then Maycie. Gracie is the only one of the three who is still in treatment, the other 2 have been cancer free for several years. They all have the genetic form though and as such are highly susceptible to future cancers. This is why we need to find a cure for ALL cancers. This is why we do things like Relay for Life. These are such precious little girls and we want to keep them safe from this horrible disease.  On the far right is Maycie's best friend who walks the relay with her. On the far left is Gracie's 5 year old sister.

James and I are occasionally hit by waves of spontaneity. Yesterday was one of those days. We decided at about noon that we really were going to go to the Relay for Life in Baytown TX that we'd already decided that it would be too difficult to make. Why would we want to go to a Relay that is 4 hours away when our very own Relay was only 1 week away? 2 very good reasons. Their names are Maycie and Leah. Maycie is a 7 year old survivor of bilateral retinoblastoma and Leah is a 5 year old survivor of unilateral genetic retinoblastoma. We have never met face to face with any other families who have experienced this disease. Although we are really good friends with Noah's family online and I've "spoken" online several times to Maycie's family as well. But we knew that Maycie and Leah would both be participating in the Baytown Relay and we really wanted to meet with them and talk with their families. Especially now when we're having to seriously consider the possibility of enucleating Gracie's right eye. Leah has had her left eye enucleated and Maycie has had both of her eyes enucleated. I wanted to see children face to face that have prosthetic eyes (I've seen hundreds of pictures) and I wanted to talk with their mothers about their experiences.

So we pulled our 7 year old out of school for the afternoon and our whole family went to Baytown. We are so glad we did it. Talking with Brandi and Angela, the mothers of Maycie and Leah, was so therapeutic for me. Seeing Maycie and Leah and how wonderfully they are doing and that they're still just typical little girls who are absolutely beautiful was so therapeutic for me. It really was just a salve for my soul meeting with those two families. Originally we were just going to go cheer them on but it ended up that Gracie walked in the survivor lap with Maycie and Leah. My eyes only got teary once. I expect I'll be a mess next week at our own Relay with our family and friends there too. I'm so proud of Gracie and how well she's handled everything that's been thrown at her since August. It was fun to walk around with Maycie as it seems that she's quite the little celebrity at the Baytown Relay for Life. I believe this is her 5th Relay and her story is quite heroic. She is completely blind, but she is CANCER FREE!!! And I was so completely impressed by what a wonderful little girl she was when I talked to her.  I look forward to the day when we can say that Gracie is cancer free too.

Again, we're so glad we went and had this wonderful experience. It was worth the 8 hours on the road yesterday and the really late night. But we made new friends, friends who understand what it's like to live with this disease and that's invaluable. It was so much fun. It's made me even more excited for our Relay this Friday night. We hope we'll see many of you there to cheer Gracie on that night. We really do appreciate your support.

Stephanie