Owen is very unique, absolutely one-of-a-kind and that's not
just because I'm his mom. He's very very one-of-a-kind. He's special, he's sweet,
and loving, and bright. He loves superheroes, he is a superhero, and he's
the best big brother to his little brothers that they could ask for. My
husband and I were told that they found the cancer during the surgery and
without any other information than that. So, you know devastating, and it took a
few days and they informed us that it was a rhabdomyosarcoma, an
unspecific type basically, and that they were very confident they would cure
this. They'll be able to cure him with 48 weeks of chemo, six weeks of radiation,
and you know they were right. On December 14th, we were able to leave the hospital,
ring the bell for the last time, and return as a cancer-free.
To hear that your child is going to have to do this again, has cancer twice,
have to go through the biggest fight of their life and they only have a 10%
chance because they don't have the data, they don't have the research to give you
a better outlook than that for a child, is just awful.
Recurrent rhabdomyosarcoma is an incredibly difficult and challenging
disease to treat and Owen made it even more challenging because one of our
modalities for therapy is now off the table and that's the radiation. So he
would get his original chemotherapy to try and reduce the tumor burden, and then
surgery to remove as much tumor as we could, and then what we call high-dose
chemotherapy and an autologous stem cell transplant. And in this case he gets
basically mega doses of chemotherapy that are substantially higher than
standard chemotherapy doses with the goal of eradicating any tumor cells that
would be left in his body. But the side effect of that is that it kills off his
bone marrow stem cells and so we give him back his own stem cells. It presents
a challenge for us, and for Owen, trying to treat this disease and trying to get
him back to being a kid again. We agreed to the research plan. We
scheduled his surgery where they were actually able to remove the entire mass
in less than an hour. We went in December 12th for the stem cell transplant, we
left January 12th of 2017 in remission and he's been in
remission ever since. People should continue to support St. Louis Children's
hospitals because it allows us as an institution to continue to do these
groundbreaking research studies and without the funding, without the support
from events like play-date we couldn't do these studies. The research study that
Owen is on is completely supported by foundation dollars.
And so without that support and without those efforts we wouldn't be
able to run that trial and provide those options to Owen and his family. My name
is Owen, I'm nine years old, and research say in my life. My hope is that kids like
Owen and his personalized treatment plan become our future because right now
Owen's success is not always the norm or reality. Too many kids and too many
parents still have a battle to fight. No one has ever prepared for the news that
their child is sick. Certainly no one envisions their child spending days and
nights confined in a room enduring endless tests or battling through
treatments. Tonight, you can decide to bring an end to that narrative. You can
decide to stand with some of the most innovative minds in research. You can
decide to back us in our fight to support personalized therapies to break
cancers' will to interrupt childhood. To one day end congenital heart disease. To
help kids fight chronic and life-threatening respiratory, metabolic,
and immune diseases. Our ideas are transformational and our goals are
ambitious. We can't do it alone, will you join us?