Last Team Tomas Light The Night

Started by Smuckatelli, June 22, 2019, 06:23:19 PM

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Smuckatelli

Tomas is off to a pretty good start this year, it's sitting at $3,325. He only needs to raise $3,017 more and he will hit his goal of $100,000 before he graduates High School.

https://pages.lightthenight.org/va/Frdrcksb19/tnichols

He will be in college next year, probably the University of Pittsburgh. He wants to take advantage of their medical program track. so this will be the last Team Tomas event in Fredericksburg.

Currently he is a certified EMT in Virginia, when he turns 18 in January the certification will be good nationwide.

He has been picked as the Drum Major for the High School Marching Band.

He has maintained a GPA of 4.02 in his first three years of high school.

Oh...almost forgot...... he is also a cancer survivor.

besilarius

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Smuckatelli

Quote from: besilarius on June 22, 2019, 07:19:40 PM
Yuh dun good, Gunny.

It's all him.......I'm just sitting here enjoying life. :)

Smuckatelli

Staggered Wing........

Tomas sends his thanks for your continued support. :)

From me, thank you brother.

Staggerwing

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Smuckatelli

#5
Many of you have supported Tomas' one pill cure throughout the years. He is going to be a senior in high school in September. He has been promoted to Drum Major for the school's Marching Band. He became certified as an EMT in Virginia last month. Now he works for the Commonwealth EMS service in Fredericksburg. He was recognized as the highest achiever in his high school last month with the 'True North' award. He has maintained a GPA of 4.02 during his first 3 years in high school. Last season he was awarded the 'most improved player' on the high school Lecrosse team.

Through all of these milestones, he still has one wish: a one pill cure for leukemia, he doesn't want any other children to go through the 3 years of chemo that he went through.

That being said, his goal is to raise $100k before he graduates high school and pursues his nursing goal at the University of Pittsburgh.

He is just under $3,000 USD from reaching his goal.

All politics aside, his heart is good, his goal is just. If you can help, he will greatly appreciate it.

https://pages.lightthenight.org/va/frdrcksb19/TeamTomas


Smuckatelli

This is turning out to be an interesting year.

My classmate from elementary school donated $2k. I hadn't seen her since 77, last January her uncle died. He was a retired Marine and she sent out a request for help on Face book. She met me outside of Quantico with all of his USMC belongings. We went to the uniform shop and got him properly set up in Dress Blue A.

James Clemente of 'Criminal Minds' fame donated $1K. He and Tomas led the walk in 2009. When he retired from the FBI he moved to Hollywood.

Smuckatelli

It's been a slow week for Tomas. He is at JMU attending the Drum Major course so he hasn't been active raising donations.

He did her a letter from General Lee....he probably has a check in that letter bit I won't know until he gets home on Saturday.

If you can help Tomas, please do.

This is the bio on General Lee:

https://valor.militarytimes.com/hero/44877

Smuckatelli

This is turning out to be a good year, Team Tomas is almost at the $100k goal...... Only $215 to go.

I'm guessing that he will probably raise the goal.

Smuckatelli

He made the $100K goal the day before Band Camp began. He posted this on Instagram:

teamtomas_ltn

Thank you to everyone who has supported this team and me through this wonderful journey. I'm so happy to say that we have reached and surpassed our goal for this year! This also means that the team has raised over $100,000 towards helping patients with blood cancers. I couldn't be more proud of the work that the team has done.
#beatingcancerisinourblood #lightthenight #onepillcure


https://www.instagram.com/p/B0hlBYdHw8l/?igshid=nfvsdmectcys&fbclid=IwAR27FHHybghoNkR-b7zMgaOW6bgrIaJCzeJlZ03WrTtMv0dwg27BML9Hmp8

I wouldn't have called it a "wonderful journey" but that's just me. He plans on keeping the site active until the walk in October.


Martok

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Smuckatelli

Martok,

Tomas sends his thanks for helping again this year. He really appreciates it. :)

Martok

You're both welcome.  :)  I can't believe he's a senior this year!  (Where did the time go??)  :o 
"Like we need an excuse to drink to anything..." - Banzai_Cat
"I like to think of it not as an excuse but more like Pavlovian Response." - Sir Slash

"At our ages, they all look like jailbait." - mirth

"If we had lines here that would have crossed all of them. For the 1,077,986th time." - Gusington

"Government is so expensive that it should at least be entertaining." - airboy

"As long as there's bacon, everything will be all right." - Toonces

Smuckatelli

Last 4 days before Tomas leads his final walk in Fredericksburg. He raised the team goal to 9k....told him that probably wasn't a good idea. It should be interesting. The band is playing at JMU on Saturday at 1435, I'll take him straight to the walk after he secures the band. We should make it there with about an hour to spare. I'll be giving the 5 minute speech and then he will come up and speak for a few minutes before he starts the walk.

If you want to donate, here's the link:

https://pages.lls.org/ltn/va/Frdrcksb19/TeamTomas

Here's the speech that I am giving. I pulled out journal entrees from 2007 while he was in treatment and put in red what the LLS is doing to address those concerns:

A little background, I went back to a journal that was kept for the first half of treatment to put the Team's effort into perspective.

4 November 2007
The journey is like a long cold winter evening with fresh snow on the ground. You and your family have to walk from your current home to a new one that you were told was constructed for you many miles away.

Portions of the route you or other members of the family are familiar with, others portions, the family are not. The fresh blanket of snow covers the route so you are not completely comfortable with what you thought you knew at the beginning. As the family begins the journey, the blasts of cold arctic air forces everyone into buckling and zipping up, a numbing sensation begins as you attempt to adjust to the environment.

The darkness of the night forces everyone to rely on other senses that they normally don't. We can't see very far so now we have to rely on hearing, touch, smell, and taste. We need to expose ears, hands, nose, and mouth, to the cold to help find the way. At the same time to much exposure could result in frostbite, gangrene, and eventually death. Not enough exposure and you will never reach the destination and eventually lead to exposure.

After the individuals in the family have adjusted to make this journey into a family endeavor,  great progress is made towards reaching the new house. At the same time complacency will lead to failure, a delicate balance of adjusting to each leg of the journey and the needs of the individuals without causing harm to the family takes on greater importance then you ever imagined, problems with one member could easily have a domino effect. As the journey progresses there will be times when whiteout conditions occur and the only option will be to make a snow cave and wait for the storm to pass. Other times the air will feel so crisp and clean that you just want to stop and go no further because you will try to convince yourself that this is good enough, no need to continue the journey someone will find us and give us a ride.

Knowing when to dig the snow cave or forcing ourselves to go on when we think we've traveled far enough is a delicate balance that needs to be assessed on a daily basis. There are no guarantees that the family will reach the house. Families that have traveled the route before illuminate a light at the end of the journey but you cannot follow completely in their footsteps because the fresh snow has covered the tracks.
We are blessed that Tomas has proven to be such an unexpected resilient navigator for our journey.

Our immediate family is adjusting to this new life with only minor bumps in the road. Our extended family has provided the love and understanding that is needed now more than ever before, and finally for the doctors, patients, and other cancer families that are illuminating guidance beacons as we navigate through this 3 year extended winter night.

On 6 October 2007, exactly one month after diagnosis; LLS Light the Night provided a beacon that Team Tomas has been following and often leading every year since.

26 November 2007
So far, Tomas is progressing very well in his treatment. Deep down we realize that we are killing healthy cells that are required for him to grow in order to kill the leukemia cells. In the back of our minds we wonder, how much is too much or not enough. As we progress down this route there are a couple of things that are constantly in mind; usually below the surface yet still present and ready to surface at the most inopportune times. He has a great prognosis of beating the leukemia, I believe around 85 percent, yet at the same time we are killing required cells in order to kill the leukemia cells.

Will he be forever crippled, physically or mentally? I don't know, yet currently I don't see problems. He is still cognizant of his surroundings and he has a mind that recalls minute details, we almost need a lawyer when we deal with toys and things of that nature. I still cry when I think of Tomas, I know that I will forever cry when I think of the hell that he is being submitted to, yet he still gives us joy and the meaning of life each day. The 85% cure rate looks good on paper yet it hides the ugly truth.

Our children are being poisoned. These statistics are flaunted to justify our societal lack of support to the cure for childhood cancer. We hear that the child didn't die from cancer, nor do we associate that he or she died of a viral infection due to the cancer treatment....I'm lost without a compass.... The answer is at our fingertips yet we ignore it because statistically we have already solved the childhood cancer problem.

Will the tears ever end? I know that they won't, Tomas will continue down his trail of death or life. At the end of the day a new realization has occurred with our family. The trail of hope, despair, anger, joy, and numbness has forever become a part of our family.

I pray that the tears will continue as Tomas goes through adulthood.

Currently he only wants 2 children because that is all that will fit in a Jeep.

While many children survive acute lymphoblastic leukemia, the most common type of pediatric blood cancer, the treatments are harsh and outdated. The long-term effects of current therapies can create severe life-threatening complications. And survival rates for children with other high-risk types of leukemia, such as acute myeloid leukemia, are very poor. That's why the LLS is more than doubling their investment in pediatric research. What's more, LLS is pioneering an unprecedented collaborative clinical trial to fundamentally change the way pediatric blood cancers are treated, while expanding the services and support they provide for children and families. The LLS Children's Initiative is a $50M multi-year endeavor.

12 December 2007

Many people have heard the old saying.......in order to save the village, we had to destroy it......attributed to the Vietnam War. Logically this made no sense, the village is destroyed....there is nothing to save.

We as a society have rejected that type of logic: we have smart weapons that target a window from 30,000 feet in the air from a plane that first flew in 1948. The critical piece to the puzzle is the controller, identifying the right target.

It angers me that we are still destroying the child in order to kill the leukemia. I need to add in, I have a military background, I completely agree with what we have deemed unacceptable as a society in how we conduct our missions. Funding has given us the ability to limit innocent deaths.

There is a lot of pork barrel money being wasted from all segments of society except childhood cancer research, that funding keeps getting cut.

Children are not little adults and the ways that cancers behave in children, and how children respond to therapy are profoundly different. We're seeing a dramatic revolution in cancer treatment, thanks to the power of precision medicine, which centers on giving the right treatment to the right patient at the right time. But progress for children has lagged behind. New and better treatments are reaching adults at a dizzying pace, but only four cancer treatments have been approved for first-use in children over the past four decades. For too long, treatment for pediatric acute leukemia has followed a one-size-fits-all approach. We need to do better. With LLS PedAL, we will.

How will PedAL work..

LLS has brought together leaders in childhood leukemia to build the foundation for a collaborative master clinical trial for children with relapsed acute leukemia. We believe collaboration is the path to cures, so LLS PedAL seeks to break down silos across sectors, scientific disciplines, institutions and countries. Working together, we will create a single set of pediatric cancer data that will be made available to researchers worldwide, identify and validate the underlying drivers of disease and match patients to the most promising targeted therapies based on their unique genetic information.


Since 2011 Tomas has been for a "one pill cure" for children that are diagnosed with blood cancer, LLS is getting us closer to that goal.