Bloomingdale Nonprofits and Charities

I was in the Wholesale Produce Business. Back in the late 90's I would weekly bring a sack of onions, a box of bananas, a bag of potatoes & a box of tomatoes to our LCM Food Pantry. Pastor Eric Dawson had helped spearhead our pantry & its Ministry. Normally when I arrived to drop off the produce the pantry had closed for the day. One day I arrived & there was a young girl with 3 small children at the desk & she spoke very quietly to Al & Jean who were our site coordinator's back then. It was the first time I'd actually seen a "Guest" in need of food. Al said this was her first time there & she looked very embarrassed at having to be there. My God, I thought. She could be any of our daughter's. <br> That day really hit my heart & I will never forget it. We tried reaching out to her but to no avail & she never came back again. We continued donating to the Food Pantry & changed to just weekly monetary offerings when grocery stores began donating produce items.

My life changed the day my daughter was born. I know, I know, every parent's life changes when they have children, but Maddie was different; she was born with a stage IV Neuroblastoma, a rare solid, malignant tumor of the sympathetic nervous system. There were tumors in two places: her spine at T-11 and a nice big tumor by her left kidney encasing two nerves. We knew there was a serious issue immediately at birth since she failed the Agpar test (we tease her that this was the only test she has ever failed :) ). In utero, the tumor had retarded much of the muscle development from her waist down.<br><br>We support CNCF http://www.cncfhope.org/ for two reasons: <br><br>1) Maddie is alive today because of a standardized protocol to treat children from age 0 to 364 days old who are diagnosed with a stage IV Neuroblastoma; this is in large part due to organizations like CNCF who advocate for the development of treatments and the standardization of these treatments across geographies. She fought the disease through spine surgery and chemo for her first year of life and has been cancer free since 11 months old. <br><br>2) Children who are diagnosed with a Neuroblastoma after 364 days have less optimistic results. At day 365, life expectancy begins to drop precipitously; the median age of diagnosis is 2 years old. Continued funding for research and early detection needs to continue to provide other children the opportunity my daughter had.<br><br>Maddie was lucky in the fact that she manifested the disease at birth, but many children don't manifest until much, much later and the results are devastating.<br><br>The photo is of her in a color run from a few years back.