Christmas cards for Noah Biorkman

[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.