Megan Update

Here are 2 photos that I received today of Megan, the daughter of Jill, one of our teammates from last year's marathon training season. Jill had to stop preparing for the race in early September when Megan was diagnosed with Rhabdomyosarcoma, a rare form of cancer.

Many of us upon hearing about her story decided to try and keep Megan in our thoughts and prayers. But being the kind of people we are, we didn't stop there. Maggie Schwarz supplied team members with bibs with Megan's photo to wear during the marathon. Eugene Koenig and I went to the kids' race the weekend following the marathon and shot a little video that we sent along to Megan to inspire her to get better (the video is on most of the DVD's that I sent out in December, but not the first batch, since it wasn't done yet). It featured a lot of the kids giving encouraging wishes to Megan on camera.

In addition, as part of Adam's Thanksgiving program, I took one of the $200 grants he graciously supplied and used it for Megan. I bought 3 CD's of Disney music, which I gave to Megan (after copying a couple of the tunes to my computer to use in the video - shhhhh, don't tell Disney!) I used the rest of the money to buy her video games for the X-Box 360 which Megan had won at a holiday raffle (ok, so the raffle may have been fixed). I had read that kids undergoing chemotherapy often find playing video games helpful to take their minds off the pain & discomfort. Plus I'm a boy and I like shopping for video games, more than say, clothes or dolls. :-)

So I put the 3 video games, the 3 CD's, the kids DVD, a marathon DVD, and a shirt from the kids' race into a FedEx box and shipped it out on Thursday night December 21st, so Megan would have everything by Christmas. And the above photos are of Megan playing one of the games while home from school on a rare "snow day" in North Carolina.

Thanks once again to Coach Adam for donating the money for the gifts, and for creating the kind of community where teammates go out of their way to help one another out whenever possible.