Light the Night Walk

On November 12, I, along with 14 other walkers on my team (team #fLOUrish) and their kids in tow participated in the Leukemia and Lymphoma Society's Light the Night Walk event. The goal of the Light the Night Walk is to raise awareness of blood cancer and raise money to fund treatments that are saving the lives of patients today. Every walker gets to have a lantern- supporters walk with red lanterns, survivors walk with white ones, and those carrying yellow lanterns symbolize remembrance for loved ones lost due to cancer. I signed up for this walk many months ago because I wanted to be involved in LLS and give back to the community as a token of appreciation for all their support during my journey. I didn't do much in terms of fundraising but as the event drew nearer, more and more people found out about it and signed up to be part of team #fLOUrish to walk with me. We went from having a team of 4 people to 17 people in total! My personal goal was $500 and I set our team goal at $1,000. I figured I could easily get to $500 and if others signed up, $1,000 should be fairly easy to attain. Little did I know that we would blow that goal right out of the water. In fact, not only did we more than raise the $1,000, as a team, we raised over 12 times that goal and ended up with just over $12,000 in total funds raised! This was rather suprising considering just two days before the walk, we were just under the $5,000 mark in terms of dollars raised. A whopping $7,000 came in on the last two days thanks to the great efforts of my team and reaching out to their network of family and friends. I ended up raising about $2,700 for myself, more than half the amount came in the last few days too. It just showed to me how everyone was so supportive of my journey, regardless of whether they knew me or not. The $12,105 total meant that our team came in at #3 in terms of dollars raised out of 225 teams! We surpassed the total of many corporations, including my very own Wells Fargo!

The route for the San Francisco walk was around AT&T Park. I really enjoyed the Walk as I had many of my close friends and supporters around me and because we had lots to celebrate. It really was a special night as I had a lot to be thankful for and lots to celebrate given that I had just gotten the results of the clean scan and was just about near the end of my chemo treatment. ABC7 News was there and they took a team pic of our group which made it up on their website. Here's the link: 
http://abc7news.com/society/photos-abc7-news-at-light-the-night-walk-in-san-francisco-/1082063/#gallery-3  (I ran into an old college friend who works for them and I think she probably had a say in what pics to use!)

Thanks again to everyone for their kindness and generosity in making the Light the Night Walk a success and one that I will remember for a very long time.