Hope, etc.

Even though nonprofit fundraising is not my strength, I'm pretty darn happy with the results from our Nashville Breathe Deep event for the Lungevity Foundation on October 19. We had a beautiful

autumn morning, and over two hundred people came out to Shelby Park for our walk/run to raise awareness about lung cancer and funding for lung cancer research. Family, friends, and the wonderful docs, nurses, and techs from Tennessee Oncology/Sarah Cannon Center and Vanderbilt Ingram Cancer Center made the morning a huge success, with everyone together raising over $43,000, more than our original goal! Guess that means we raise the bar for next year! We're also grateful to all the kind folks who made donations online, even if they couldn't make it out to the event.

I'm especially proud of Erica Changas Collins, Tara Watson, Robert Pirtle, their families, and mine, who go all out in organizing this event; I'm honored to be on the committee with them. I also got to see my wonderful colleagues from Volunteer State Community College, who founded our event team, The Litwits, last year. And, my lovely pals from The University of Tennessee at Martin boarded a bus at 4 a.m. with a group of Honors Programs University Scholars in order to volunteer at 7 a.m. and run at 8 a.m.! They win the prize for getting up the earliest and traveling the farthest! Here's a link to our GREAT photo album!

Next up is Lung Cancer Awareness Month, November. I'll be turning my fundraising attentions to another favorite project, the GO2 Foundation for Lung Cancer ROS1der Global Initiative.  This project seeks to raise $500,000 toward research into the very rare ROS1 gene fusion, an acquired mutation that happens to be driving my particular type of cancer. About 1-2% of lung cancer patients are ROS1 positive, and we are active participants in research we hope will make a real difference in the future of lung cancer treatment. So, if you didn't have a chance to donate to Breathe Deep and are looking for an end-of-year tax credit or some such thing, check out the link in this paragraph!

Last year I worked with some friends to organize a really beautiful fundraising dinner for this ROS1 project. But this year, I'm really worn out from chemo and radiation (I just had three more spots in my brain treated today; I'll write more on that another time), so I haven't been motivated to organize anything yet. Plus, I'm not so much enjoying food these days, so a fancy dinner gala is not in the cards this year. If you have any ideas for a ROS1 fundraiser I can do from the couch, let me know! I'd love to meet my goal of $10,000 by the end of November.

Here are a few of my favorite pictures from the Breathe Deep event.

Poet and photographer Darren Rankins snaps some pics
of people taking pics

Rachel leads pre-race yoga warm-up

Kids warming up with Rachel

Golden Laurels (UTM Students)

Start line

I'm looking forward to next year's Breathe Deep!