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

June 29, 2015

Monday, June 29, 2015

Monday, June 29, 2015

Tonight's picture was taken on June 15, 2009. Mattie was in the pre-op area getting ready for his sternotomy. By this point, this pre-op area was getting to be an old routine for us, since Mattie had already had two major surgeries before this one. In order to lighten the mood, Peter wrote a sign on Mattie's hospital gown. The sign was meant for Mattie's surgeon, Dr. Chahine. The sign read.... "Dr. Chahine.... give us a Mattie Miracle!!!!" Meaning, we were asking Dr. Chahine to remove all of Mattie's lung tumors that day. 


Quote of the day: There is no illness that is not exacerbated by stress. ~ Allan Lokos


Over the course of the weekend, I felt as if I was passing a kidney stone. So my urologist advised me to get an X-ray today to confirm what was going on and to see if I had other stones. That meant that I had to contact my other doctors to request the scan. The beauty of healthcare in many ways is you have to constantly advocate for yourself and at times be your own physician. Though I like my nephrologist, I know that his office is dysfunctional and the likelihood that I would get a hold of him today and get the scan completed with results would be low. So instead, I contacted my internist, who I have seen for years. 

However in order to get access to my doctor, I had to work through her gatekeepers. I left a message with her nurse at 6:30am. However, by 10am, the nurse hadn't called me back, and I wasn't planning on waiting any longer. So I called the office back and dealt with the receptionist. I feel for her, because she really did not know what hit her. She wanted to put me in a voice mail, and I told her absolutely not, that I needed to talk to a live person and I needed my issue dealt with today. I gave her the history of my problem and she tried to tell me that my urologist needed to order the X-ray for me. When I told her that my urologist doesn't handle kidney stones, she started arguing with me. Not a good plan, because I let her have it, until we had a meeting of the minds. 

Finally we got on the same page, and she got a hold of my doctor, got the scan ordered for me, and even arranged for my doctor to call me in the hospital with the results. So clearly my level of agitation came across in spades. When you go through five days of pain, with no one really helping you manage the pain.... edgy seems like a very natural by product in my book. Now with the July 4th holiday coming up, I wanted answers!!! 

With all that said, being in hospitals put me on a heightened sense of alert. They make me anxious and after my scan was done today they put me in a holding room, until my doctor called me with the results. This is the same type of holding room with a phone that I was in when I received Mattie's scan results at Virginia Hospital Center on July 23, 2008. It was just too eerie today, and sitting in that room made me tense. Almost like a caged rat until the phone rang and I got to talk to my doctor who confirmed, another stone. 


This evening, Peter and I went for a walk after dinner around the Washington Mall. If you look closely you can see Mattie Moon to the right of the Monument.















The sun setting and its beautiful rays!













This was "Mattie's Fountain," as I call it, because Mattie loved how the water would shoot out of it almost like a cannon. 




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