I'm crying as I write this. You'll see why, but first—Monsters! Scary Monsters! RARRRGHR! That's what our little boy here says, he holds his eighteen-month-old arms straight out with clawly hands, and makes that monster sound, and the squee factor is just off the charts. If you act scared and run, or monster him back, he just laughs and laughs and laughs, and there just ain't no laughs like baby laughs.
Here's another little boy who likes monsters, little Aidan, he likes to draw them. Already he's got hundreds of pictures of monsters, and he's only five years old. So that's really cute, but the thing is, he's also got the same disease that killed my little boy when he was two years younger: leukemia. My son went through hell, and then died, because there was no cure for it at the time, but now there's a good chance little Aidan can live.
This shit's expensive. In today's money, we ran up bills close to a million dollars. Aidan's family was facing the same thing and they came up with a fantastic solution: the monsters! They put Aidan's drawings up for sale—and the really good part—people bought them, so many people the little guy earned a lot of money, enough to pay for all his cancer treatment so far! That's just amazing.
There's a blog here, that I can't stand to read, but you can go there and get the details along with lots of cute pictures and uplifting stories.
I love that a little kid can earn stuff for himself as much as I hate that it has to go for a thing like this. They're not out of the woods yet. There'll be more treatments, and more expenses, and more of oh god things I don't even want to think about, and I so so so hope at the end a happy, healthy, living, little boy.
What do you think? Wouldn't one of these monsters look good hanging in a frame on your wall?
2 comments:
Wow, amazing story - thanks (and a warm thought for your little boy gone).
You hate that the money has to go for a thing like this - I hate it that my friends and cousins south of the 49th parallel have to even think about finding that kind of money, just because in the prevailing view of American exceptionalism, the basic universal healthcare that is a fundamental right in the rest of the developed world is considered BigBadCreeeping Socialism with a capital S and that stands for Satan and Stalin and The End of the World As We Know It. Leukemia is a tragic thing; health-care-for-profit is just fucken stupid evil.
You probly wouldn't like this story I guess.
Post a Comment