Today I was, once again, reminded that life can sometimes throw you incredible curves and that within mere moments everything can change. While I’m at home tonight feeling very grateful that our scariest moments with Lily ended happily, my heart is with other people and hoping that, for them, tomorrow is a better day.
Tomorrow is also my dad’s aneurysm surgery. We’ll be up bright and early to meet him at the hospital downtown before his surgery begins and then then spend the day waiting to hopefully hear that the surgery was a success. As a bittersweet bonus, Lily actually has an ophthalmology appointment at Sick Kids at 8:30am, just after the surgery begins and it’s directly across the street from Toronto General, so we’ll head over there for some much needed distraction. There is nothing I hate more than just sitting around in the surgical waiting rooms, it’s like hanging out in the place that time forgot – everything moves so slowly. But, fingers crossed that by this time tomorrow night all of this will be behind us and we’ll be focused on getting my dad up and moving so that he can get home as quickly as possible.
So, with all of this, I feel the need to send a little good karma out into the world. First of all, I want to say a gigantic huge thank you to any and all of you who were kind enough to donate to Team LilyBug for the Toronto Buddy Walk this weekend! We feel incredibly supported and were genuinely shocked at your generosity – including our anonymous donors (who, by the way, should at least make themselves known to us so that we can say thank you properly!). We certainly weren’t expecting to raise a lot of funds, and were just hoping to do our small part to raise awareness around Down syndrome, but it has ended up with a pleasant surprise and we’re so incredibly grateful. If you’re interested in donating, or joining us for a 3km walk on Saturday morning, you can check out our page here!
I also want to say thank you to the 77 people out there who have registered to become Organ Donors as part of our campaign! Our original goal was to get 50 people registered and when we hit that, we doubled our goal to 100 people and now we’re almost there! Let’s just do the simple math on that. Each organ donor can save up to 8 lives. 77 new donors x 8 = 616 saved lives. That’s the size of a small elementary school! If you haven’t signed up, please just take 2 minutes today to sign up. You can follow the link to join our campaign. To become a hero – a person who saves the lives of 8 people and helps countless others – all you need is your health card and 2 minutes. 2 minutes to save 8 lives…you can’t tell me that you’ve ever accomplished so much in such a short amount of time. Or, wait until tomorrow and when you’re having an unproductive moment at work, come back here, follow the link to register and then you can justify the 20 minutes you spent reading Buzzfeed. Then, share the link and convince the people you love to register as well. Do it for me, do it for my dad, and of course, do it for Lily!
