Thoughts on swimming, training and staying afloat in rough waters and calm seas.
Friday, September 7, 2012
Countdown: 8 Days
Eight more days. Ironically, it seems like both forever and not long enough. Between now and next Saturday there is so much to be done: One more river swim. A safety meeting to make sure we listen to our kayakers and don't swim into barges. A team dinner. Final pool practices. A thousand dollars more to raise to meet my personal goal of $2500. Eight more days! Did I mention I'm moving too? It's all a bit overwhelming.
With eight days left to go, there is a temptation to just throw up my hands and give up on trying to meet the fundraising goal. It's too much, too hard, people must be getting sick of me asking. But I'm doing this for truly sick people. One person in the United States is diagnosed with a blood cancer approximately every four minutes. That means that in the eight days that I have left, 2880 Americans will begin the fight of their lives. 2880 people will discover that their blood has turned against them. 2880 mothers, fathers, daughters, sons, will have bad news for the people who love them.
The good news is, 2880 people will have much better odds than they would have a few decades ago, because of the work of the Leukemia and Lymphoma Society. When LLS was founded in 1949, a blood cancer diagnosis was almost always a death sentence. Now, survival rates have doubled, tripled and even quadrupled for blood cancer patients. The research and advocacy of LLS has been a huge part of that change.
I'm swimming for those 2880 people and the hundreds of thousands of others who are living with and dying from blood cancers. Will you help me?
To donate, please visit my donation page at http://pages.teamintraining.org/wch/Hudson12/emilyg
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