Christmas cards for Noah Biorkman

[snopes]

http://www.snopes.com/inboxer/medical/biorkman.asp

[RCIAG]

Looks legit to me.

Poor kid & parents.

Post on a blog from a few hours ago:
http://aggman.vox.com/

From July:
http://aggman.vox.com/library/posts/...ash+in+canton/

[HelloLlama]

We go to the same clinic as Noah and I have met him and his mother on several occasions. In fact, we saw them just last week. The picture of him as Batman in RCIAG's link was taken on that day. That's the child life specialist (whom we know very well) with him, dressed up as a football player. The Peds Infusion staff all came as athletes.

I don't know the Biorkmans very well, but it is obvious that Noah is a very, very sick boy and likely doesn't have much time left. We are going to the clinic tomorrow. I can ask the staff to verify for me the card request, but I suspect that part is also true.

[HelloLlama]

Here is some news footage:
http://www.clickondetroit.com/video/21525126/index.html

[RCIAG]

The only downside to asking for cards is they'll probably be getting them until the end of the interent & beyond.

I'm going home tonite to see what Christmas cards I have in my closet.

How is it that at work I'm getting glurge & memes from 2005 yet I've only heard about this here? I think for once I plan on sending out something that's actually current, true & positive.

No anti-Obama rants, no health care reform lies, no God-won't-love-you-if-you-don't-forward-this garbage, just a good deed for a family that will most likely lose their little boy before Christmas.

[HelloLlama]

I was going to ask some of the employees about this when Neill and I got to the clinic on Friday. But I didn't have to ask someone about it second hand: Noah and his mother, Diana, actually showed up at the clinic while we were there. I talked at length with her about all of this and she was very open about everything.

Apparently, when they decided to have Christmas early Diana contacted her friends and family for some help in making it special. One friend asked if she could post about it on Facebook and Diana agreed. She had no idea how fast or how far this would spread. Seemingly overnight they started to receive thousands of cards in the mail from all over the world.

She said that it's almost like Noah has become the poster child for neuroblastoma, and that if this raises awareness about the disease and leads to better treatments she'd be grateful because she doesn't want other families to have to go through this. But that this attention they are getting is just crazy and starting to get intrusive.

She originally gave interviews to channel 4 and a couple of radio stations, but now all the other media outlets have been trying to contact the family and she's had to just ignore them. The mailman has been dropping off multiple boxes of 100s of cards every day. FedEx delivered 24 packages in one morning. People were actually coming up to their home, knocking on their door, and asking to see Noah! (Really, what were these people thinking? He's a sick little boy, with a limited amount of time left, not some circus animal to be put on display!)* Two women even showed up from a church and wanted Diana to go get Noah so they could give him a book about Jesus! She handled these people with far more grace than I could have mustered. They finally had to put a sign on the door telling uninvited guests to respect their privacy and stop ringing their doorbell.

It is quite strange for me, having read all of these forwarded email requests about sick kids over the years, to finally get a glimpse of it from the other side. They never asked for this kind of attention. And while they know people mean well, they are hoping they can be left alone long enough to celebrate Noah's last "Christmas" without intrusion. I really hope that, at least for this weekend, they can be granted some privacy.


*This is my opinion. I don't want anybody to think that these were Diana's words.

[RCIAG]

For the most part, those sick kid emails aren't legit or are way past their expiration date. At least most of the ones I end up getting. This is the first legit one I've seen in a while but then everyone here at work is about 5 years behind in internet memes. I just got the Ben Stein Christmas rant last week & that thing is from 2005.

Like I said before, they'll be getting Christmas cards forever. Especially nowadays when these things show up in your email or the net again & again every few years or so.

I don't know if that's a good thing or not & I wonder what they're going to do with all of the cards?