Mattie Miracle Walk 2023 was a $131,249 success!

Mattie Miracle Cancer Foundation Promotional Video

Thank you for keeping Mattie's memory alive!

Dear Mattie Blog Readers,

It means a great deal to us that you take the time to write to us and to share your thoughts, feelings, and reflections on Mattie's battle and death. Your messages are very meaningful to us and help support us through very challenging times. To you we are forever grateful. As my readers know, I promised to write the blog for a year after Mattie's death, which would mean that I could technically stop writing on September 9, 2010. However, at the moment, I feel like our journey with grief still needs to be processed and fortunately I have a willing support network still committed to reading. Therefore, the blog continues on. If I should find the need to stop writing, I assure you I will give you advanced notice. In the mean time, thank you for reading, thank you for having the courage to share this journey with us, and most importantly thank you for keeping Mattie's memory alive.


As Mattie would say, Ooga Booga (meaning, I LOVE YOU)! Vicki and Peter



The Mattie Miracle Cancer Foundation celebrates its 7th anniversary!

The Mattie Miracle Cancer Foundation was created in the honor of Mattie.

We are a 501(c)(3) Public Charity. We are dedicated to increasing childhood cancer awareness, education, advocacy, research and psychosocial support services to children, their families and medical personnel. Children and their families will be supported throughout the cancer treatment journey, to ensure access to quality psychosocial and mental health care, and to enable children to cope with cancer so they can lead happy and productive lives. Please visit the website at: www.mattiemiracle.com and take some time to explore the site.

We have only gotten this far because of people like yourself, who have supported us through thick and thin. So thank you for your continued support and caring, and remember:

.... Let's Make the Miracle Happen and Stomp Out Childhood Cancer!

A Remembrance Video of Mattie

October 25, 2014

Saturday, October 25, 2014

Saturday, October 25, 2014

Tonight's picture was taken in October of 2004. Mattie was invited to a Halloween party at the George Washington University that was being held by some of my students. My students invited children from the community to the event and treated the children to free books and then escorted them around campus for trick or treating. As you can see Mattie got a wonderful dog shaped balloon and also picked out a couple of books. He wanted me to read his Franklin the Turtle book to him on the spot and in our perspective he made a wonderful Winnie the Pooh that year!

Quote of the day: Listen to that little voice inside you. Sometimes it can whisper meaningful words of wisdom and make more sense than the deafening noise of opinions and judgments outside. ~ Roopleen

Peter and I have had a very LONG day commuting back home to Washington, DC! Try over seven hours!!! So I will be making this short. Our original direct flight from Toronto to DC was canceled and instead we were re-routed on a connecting flight through Philadelphia. However before packing up and boarding a plane, we had to present to an audience of professionals at 8am! The room we presented in was a huge ballroom and though this was the last day of the conference, people slowly started to fill up the room, despite the early hour!

The panel presentation we participated in from 8 to 9:30am today was entitled, "Quality of Life: A Need or a Luxury?" Each panelist covered a specific topic and covered personal experiences and research related to a sub-topic. The topics covered were:

  • The utility of HRQL measurement in clinical practice
  • Quality of life: the sixth vital sign
  • The challenge of measuring quality of life during treatment with the implementation of a webportal
  • Why quality of life guides the development of a the National Psychosocial Standard of Care for Childhood Cancer Project
Peter and I were invited to present on this panel by Martha Grootenhuis! Who lives and works in Amsterdam. Martha is one of the distinguished psychologists who serves on our National Psychosocial Standard of Care project and she wanted to highlight the standards at this International conference. Therefore Peter and I felt compelled to attend and support this endeavor.

Peter snapped this photo of me with two of our panel presenters this morning. Faith Gibson (in red) is a Clinical Professor of Children’s and Young People’s Cancer Care and she leads the Center for Nursing and Allied Health Research at the Great Ormond Street Hospital in London. Martha Grootenhuis  is the Head of Research and Co-Director of the Pediatric Psychology Department at Emma Children's Hospital, Amsterdam. Martha has attended each Mattie Miracle psychosocial think tank and has worked diligently on our standards project.


To my surprise, I got to meet Ulrika Kreicbergs (far left) today. Ulrika is the Chair of the Palliative Care for Children Program which was established in coordination between a non-profit called Ersta Diakoni (part of the Ersta Hospital in Sweden) and Ersta Skondal University.

In our power point slides, we cited research literature by Kreicbergs! In fact, in both book chapters that I wrote this summer, I cited research by Kreicbergs. I happen to like her research a lot, especially because her focus is on child loss and the impact of this loss on parents and their quality of life. There is a very special feeling to meeting a researcher in person, a person who I have only known through words and paper. It is wonderful to now be able to connect a face and person to a name! It makes her work much more real and tangible to me which is an added gift!
 




Clouds















Mattie Moon

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