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 15, 2017

Sunday, October 15, 2017

Sunday, October 15, 2017

Tonight's picture was taken in October of 2008. Mattie was two months into treatment and it was before his first limb salvaging surgery. Frankly chemotherapy was bad enough, but what made our situation twenty times worse were all of the major limb surgeries Mattie needed. Mattie was never the same physically or psychologically after his surgeries. On this particular day in the photo, Mattie's cousins were visiting from Boston. They had a full and active day together, ending with running around the flag poles near our home. The ironic part about all of this is I can't pass those flag poles now without thinking of this moment in time. 


Quote of the day: There are no dogs in heaven, then when I die I want to go where they went. ~ Will Rogers


Peter and I went out today to do some chores. When we got home, someone was working me hard to go out for a walk. Sunny followed me up the steps and down the steps and was supervising me as I was putting my sneakers on!!!

Sunny is a velcro dog and he primarily does this with me only! Peter jokes that Sunny is my "boyfriend" and that he looks at me the same way Mattie used to look at me. Not sure about that, but one thing is for certain, where ever I am, Sunny is not far behind. 








I have no idea why I thought about this today, but it dawned on me that if Mattie had only one bone tumor at diagnosis he most likely would be alive today. I have no clue, why 8 years after Mattie's death, I should be reflecting on this. I imagine that early on in Mattie's diagnosis process I thought about this fact, but back then I was probably too clueless to know the significance and the extremely poor prognosis he had with multiple primary bone tumors. I thought it was devastating knowing about the one huge tumor in his right arm but the other tumors were found by happenstance. 

Mattie was given a CT scan to determine if his cancer progressed to his lungs, since that is the usual trajectory of osteosarcoma. It was during the CT scan of his lungs, that the imaging caught his left arm on the scans by accident. The scan detected no disease progression in his lungs, but instead another large tumor was found in Mattie's left arm. At that point, Mattie's whole body had to be scanned because he had a very rare form of osteosarcoma. Maybe one child every ten years around the world, develops a cancer like Mattie's. After a full body scan, we learned that Mattie had four primary tumors (one in each arm, right left, and left wrist). 

The reason why I believe childhood cancer is comprised of multiple traumas, is for this very reason I am describing. I thought our world ended when we heard Mattie had one tumor in his right arm. Yet once we learned that he had four tumors, we really longed for the previous diagnosis. With each stage of Mattie's treatment process we were faced with more bad news, challenging decisions, and seeing Mattie transformed before our eyes. Yet while interacting this week with parents who also lost their children to cancer or have childhood cancer survivors, I noticed that we all sound the same! The same in the sense that the traumas are part of our lives, we reflect on them often, and time doesn't change our reality or how we think of this reality. We may function and continue to move forward, but forward doesn't mean without our child, forgetting our child, or returning back to normal! 

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