Welcome to our fundraising page for Rady Children's Hospital-San Diego, where our beloved son and brother Xavier Tan has received exceptional care!
In honor of Childhood Cancer Awareness Month I am supporting Rady Children's Peckham Center for Cancer and Blood Disorders, the leading health care provider of its kind in our region.
Just last year, 286 kids were newly diagnosed with a form of pediatric cancer at Rady Children's. Xavier's form of aggressive brain cancer is inoperable with only radiation therapy as the only standard-of-care treatment. Rady Children's offers the most advanced and safest type of radiation therapy, proton therapy, which Xavier started three weeks after diagnosis.
After radiation therapy, some brain cancer kids have no other treatment options and some families are told to just go home to make memories! However, Xavier's neuro-oncologist at Rady Children's, Dr. John Crawford, offered several different clinical trials, one that was considered the best available. Xavier started this trial about one month after his proton therapy ended. The trial lasted just four months and so it did not go as well as we had hoped, but maybe at least it slowed down the cancer.
Meanwhile, Dr. Crawford and his research team performed an innovative experiment to identify a number of drugs that potently killed the biopsied tumor cells. From this result, we selected one drug as part of his latest treatment plan which has been successful in preventing the growth of the primary tumor. This is a great result for a previously-treated recurrent tumor!
Therefore, Rady Children's offers some of the best treatment strategies for kids like Xavier. I want to shine a golden light of support for them, their families and the Peckham Center team members, who care for hundreds of children each year.
- donating to my page to help me reach my fundraising goal;
- creating your own fundraising page; or
- sharing my page with others who believe in hope and healing.