Tonight's picture was taken in September of 2008. As you can see Mattie was stacking his markers, not unlike blocks! Mattie was a builder by heart! Stacking, building, and creating gave Mattie pleasure and as you can see.... it put a smile on his face! Whatever brought a smile to his face was an approved activity in our book! So much so that such items would fill our two by four of a room up! Every inch of our room would be filled at times! With large cardboard boxes too, since Mattie loved constructing and designing with boxes.
Quote of the day: Empty pockets never held anyone back. Only empty heads and empty hearts can do that. ~ Norman Vincent Peale
Last night I watched a show on TV called the Red Band Society. This show
is a dark dramedy focused on a group of teenagers living together as patients in a hospital's pediatric ward. I imagine this show was well timed to be aired in the month of September, which is National Childhood Cancer Awareness Month. In any case, this show has been getting promoted big time all over the place and if I heard it one more time on the radio, I thought I was going to scream. So I decided given the hype, maybe I should watch it because just perhaps Hollywood was going to surprise me and capture the true essence of what Mattie and our life looked like living in a PICU and battling childhood cancer! Maybe, just maybe, Hollywood was going to give us the pediatric version of the hit show ER! If that was the case, I certainly did not want to miss out!
Within the first few seconds of the shows opening scenes, Peter and I knew right away that this pilot was not targeted to us. Quite honestly I am not sure who this show is targeted to, other than the lowest of the low. I would say teenagers, but frankly that is insulting and generalizing to all teens. The dialogue is lude, crude, unimaginative, and totally unbelievable to anyone who has lived within a children's unit. Children do not have free reign within a hospital. They do not migrate from unit to another, interacting with adult patients, eating and conversing in adult patient rooms, and worse off, children are not making medical decisions for themselves without having parents around. In this series there ARE NO parents present. Typical Hollywood! Parents are NOT necessary, they are the evil ones, the uncool ones, the ones kids want to escape from, even when gravely ill! Newsflash..... KIDS WANT THEIR PARENTS AROUND FOR THE MOST PART WHEN THEY ARE SICK AND IN A HOSPITAL! In this show everyone was hateful and it left me absolutely perplexed that a young teen with an eating disorder was living long term in a pediatric unit with children with cancer! WHY???? So much about that show made NO sense!
Of course there is NO mention to the actual red band (the title of the show itself)! In the show you see all the kids wearing red bands, as their hospital ID tags, but for those of us who have ever had a sick child know all too well... red bands indicate only allergies to medications. They are NOT hospital IDs!!!! So to Peter and I the whole name of the show is a misnomer. But moving passed that faux pas, it is the whole callous manner in which serious medical issues are addressed in this pilot. After watching this show for 15 minutes, we had to turn it off. I was incensed because anyone who has experienced such a crisis or worse lost a child in a pediatric unit knows that the picture they are portraying is a farce. The show glamorizes pediatric illness to the public which is disheartening, and it belittles my experience, it mocks the fine work that pediatric units actually accomplish each and every day around our Country, and worse it completely hides the value that parents and families serve every day within these hospital settings.
I went on line this evening to look for reviews of this nightmare of a show and found one by the Hollywood Reporter! The Hollywood Reporter gets an A in my book!
Hollywood Reporter Review:
http://www.hollywoodreporter.com/review/fox-red-band-society-octavia-spencer-733574
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