Welcome to 2017, with all of the promise that a new year has
to offer. All of us from Camp Good Days
and Special Times are excited to see what this year will bring. Hopefully, we have laid the groundwork, and
there will be some movement with Cancer Mission 2020 this year. I hope that we will take a big step towards
reaching the goal of making cancer the type of disease that when someone is
diagnosed, they can continue to live a good quality of life and hopefully die
from something other than their cancer. There
is a lot of good work being done to help achieve that, but I am hoping that
with the election of the new president, and with one party having the majority
of the two houses, that maybe some of the bickering that has plagued our
government over these past many years will end, and we can move forward towards
getting something accomplished.
To me, and I think to many of you, what could be more important
than finding some of the answers to this disease that takes so many of our
loved ones? As we have said many times, cancer
is not a Republican, Democrat, Conservative, or Liberal disease, it is an equal
opportunity illness that unfortunately takes 11,000 of our fellow Americans
every single week. When your chances of being diagnosed with cancer in your
lifetime are greater than that of tripping while using your Smartphone, I think
it is time that something concrete gets done.
Your chances of tripping while texting are 1-in-10, but in the United
States today, your chances of being diagnosed with cancer in your lifetime as a
woman is 1-in-3 and as a man it is 1-in-2. Those are certainly not odds that we
should continue to live with.
With your help, and with the help of the many 1,000s of
people that have signed our Cancer Mission 2020 petitions, something can be
done. We need people who are not afraid
to stand up and be counted. Urge your family, your friends, and your co-workers,
to get involved and help us say that we want action. I am pretty confident that we will begin to
see some. If you haven’t signed the
Cancer Mission 2020 petition, please do so today, and I hope that you will join
with us. As we have said, Cancer Mission
2020 is like a tripod; the first leg of the tripod is education and sharing
with people where we are with our efforts to cure cancer. The second is a call to action, which we
started with the call to increase the number of clinical trials and trying to
secure additional funding for these trials, as those are where some of the
answers to cancer are going to come from.
The last leg is accountability, which so often is sorely missing when it
comes to cancer and cancer research.
I am pleased that Vice President Biden has said in some of
his final interviews as Vice President that he is going to commit his time and
efforts to help lead the way to finding the answers to cancer. And I know that Louise Slaughter and Tom Reed
who have been very, very supportive will do what they can do to help as well. I am also excited to hear about the work that
Eric Trump, our President Elect’s son, has done. He has been out there working to help secure
funds for cancer. I think that this is
the time to come together, and maybe we can convince President Elect Trump to
make one more cabinet level position; meaning for the lack of a better
expression, a cancer tsar, someone whose sole job is to bring all of the
efforts to finding the answers to cure cancer together, so that we can have a
coordinated effort rather than the fragmented effort that we have today.
I needed no greater
reminder of the devastation of cancer than these past couple of weeks, when I
learned that someone who was a very large part of Camp Good Days in its
formative years, Sonia Basko had died. I first met Sonia when she was just
becoming a teenager following her diagnosis of Hodgkin’s Disease. Sonia was a regular at Camp Good Days with
our summer camping programs, our Kris Connection, and our annual Florida
trip. While I haven’t really seen Sonia
in a while, it was nice reading the notes about her and to hear some of her
friends and co-workers speak at her funeral about what she has gone on to
accomplish with her life’s work of education and support of social justice
causes for teachers. I am confident that
when she gets to heaven, she will reunite with some of her friends from the
early days at Camp Good Days, but I am nervous that she might start to unionize
them. I was happy to have the opportunity
to talk to Sonia’s sister and mother at the funeral and was honored to listen
to them express how much Camp Good Days meant to Sonia and her sister in
different ways. Her sister came to our
sibling camping program and Sonia came to our programs for children with
cancer. Like many of our long term
survivors, it wasn’t the cancer that directly took Sonia’s life; she contracted
pneumonia as she began to treat her reoccurrence. Sonia, like many of our former campers, had a
weakened immune system. Diseases that a
healthy person’s body would be able to reject and fight vigorously are hard to
fight for someone who had cancer and therefore a very weak immune system. One of
the first things I did when I learned of Sonia’s passing was to look through my
office to find a couple of pictures of Sonia, and what I found were pictures
that were taken when we took the kids from our Kris Connection to meet President
and Nancy Reagan in the Diplomatic Greeting Room in the White House. I can’t help but wonder if that was the start
of Sonia’s lobbying efforts. I also
found her questionnaire that she filled out when she signed up for Kris
Connection when she was thirteen. Sonia’s
presence will be greatly missed here at Camp Good Days.
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| Participants of Kris Connection at the White House in the Diplomatic Greeting Room circa 1987 |
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| President and Nancy Reagan meeting the participants of Kris Connection circa 1987 |
To stay in touch with Camp Good Days, visit our website, www.campgooddays.org. Also, visit our Cancer Mission 2020 website
to stay up-to-date, and to sign our petition if you haven’t already done so, www.cancermission2020.org. You can also listen to our radio show, Good
Days and Special Times, the first Thursday of every month at 6:30 PM with WYSL
on 1040 AM or 92.1 FM. If you cannot
tune in when the show is airing, you can listen to the show as a podcast on the
WYSL website, www.wysl1040.com.
I will try to do a better job of keeping these posts a
little more up-to-date, and I ask you to bear with me. I wish all of you a New Year that will be
filled with good health, happiness, peace, and the most important ingredient,
love.
