Welcome Friends and Family

Update: For anyone that’s just landing here for the first time, Mae went home to be with her Lord on July 2, 2009, after 2 1/2 years of battling a nasty brain tumor. However, I continue to update this site as our family struggles to go on without Mae. Below is the original introduction to Mae’s journey with cancer.

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April, 2007

At the suggestion of a good friend, I decided to blog about our 7-year old daughter Mae’s battle with cancer. It’s a battle our whole family is fighting, and we know all of you reading this are standing with us. Feel free to leave comments on any of the pages.

For those that don’t know, Mae began having seemingly unrelated symptoms starting in January 2007. She had a little trouble focusing on school work, things just started taking longer to get done. She also began complaining about her eyes, that things far away were blurry. Then we noticed she would forget small things here and there, like a letter, number or word. Then her right eye started crossing randomly. But we just couldn’t put any of them together, each symptom alone was easy to explain away. A trip to the ophthalmologist resulted in his request for an MRI as a routine measure. That’s when we found an area of swelling in the center of her brain (the thalamus), which ultimately ended up being diagnosed as a tumor. The tumor is a grade III astrocytoma, or glioma. It’s considered “aggressive”, so the treatment is aggressive.

We have faith and hope in God, that Mae will be completely healed. We’ve been on our knees, and found new strength each time. And all it takes is one look at Mae, hearing either “I’m gooooooood” or seeing the “thumbs up” sign to know she’ll beat this.