Extreme Makeover: Home Edition-Lymphoma story.

Two mothers each striving to keep their family safe and intact in neighboring counties in northeast Iowa. One woman, Audrey, is a mother of six widow who lost 1/4 of her brain and most of her eyesight following five massive aneurysms. The other woman, Sue, is in the middle of a divorce and caretaker for two of her three adult children, all of whom use wheelchairs because of spinal muscular atrophy. Audrey was chosen by the ABC tv series "Extreme Makeover:Home Edition" as a recipient of a new house. Audrey's late husband had passed away from non-Hodgkin's lymphoma. She ignored her own blackouts around the chaos and sorrow of her husband's death. The next year she ended up with brain surgery.

Sue did not receive a home makeover due to the show being cancelled. Once Audrey heard Sue's story she decided to launch various fundraiser events to have a "mini-extreme" makeover for her. She claims that if she won the lottery she would launch a local permanent version of Extreme Home-makeover to provide fully assessable housing to disabled Iowans.

This is a perfect example of paying it forward in life!

To read more on this story:

http://www.desmoinesregister.com/article/20120129/NEWS/301290058/0/BUSINESS/?odyssey=nav%7Chead

A Father and Son's battle with non-Hodgkin's lymphoma

In 2008, a young man named James DeMasi was diagnosed with non-Hodgkin's lymphoma , the same disease that his father later passed away from. After watching his father die of cancer, and battling the disease himself to remission, he decided he was going to take on cancer head on. He started a team in the Philadelphia Walk for Lymphoma and raised the most money with almost $30,000 to go toward blood cancer research and patient support. James claims that "I do everything in my dad's memory....losing him had an even greater impact on me than my own battle with cancer did".

For more information on this story, read here:

http://www.nj.com/gloucester-county/towns/index.ssf/2012/01/light_the_night_walk_team_head.html