All For A Good Cause!

For some reason, I only hear Yonce all over this song...I'm kidding! I do hear Melissa Ethridge a lil bit too. No seriously, some of the best female artists - Mariah aka Hello Kitty, Beyonce, Rih Rih, Mary, Keyshia Cole, Melissa Etheridge etc. - got together to record a song called, "Just Stand Up" to support Up To Cancer (SU2C), a new initiative to raise philanthropic dollars for accelerating ground-breaking cancer research. And lucky for us, we get to see all Divas perform the song live on Friday, Septemeber 5th when ABC, CBS, and NBC simultaneously devote one hour of commercial-free prime-time to this nationwide event. This will be the first simultaneous cross-network broadcast ever to raise funds for the fight against a disease. To listen to the song click: Can somebody else get on the mic Yonce? Dayum! And the Kodjoes are speaking out about their daughter and her battle with Spina Bifida. Nicole and Boris wrote us a letter: Dear Friends, We hope you are well. We are writing this letter to share with you a most personal issue and ask for your help. As some of you already heard, our little Sophie was diagnosed at birth with Spina Bifida, the most common birth defect in the US, affecting the brain and/or spine in an average of eight babies a day. Degrees of severity vary from quadriplegic children with major brain damage and spinal injuries to cases of neurogenic bladders or even lesser issues. We were blessed with a miracle child and spared of the more severe symptoms, but Sophie’s spastic bladder still forces us to catheterize her every three hours, day and night, to avoid pressure build up in her bladder and urine backflow into her kidneys. But frequent catheterization causes urinary tract infections, which are then battled with strong antibiotics, which in turn attack stomach flora and cellular balance, cause bowel issues, and that leads to more infections. It’s a never ending cycle and the prognosis from specialists all over the world is a life long dependency on catheterization and diapers, unless we’d agree to a bladder augmentation, which is quite risky and not a way we want her to live. While being a simple body function for able-bodied individuals, these activities may take hours for children with Spina Bifida. So after educating ourselves, studying hundreds of domestic and international cases, and researching alternative and traditional methods, our friend Jim Okula at the Spina Bifida Association of GA called us because he came across Dr Xiao from China. Xiao is the first and only person in the world who has developed a procedure of surgically rerouting nerves from the legs to the bladder, providing a new pathway for autonomic stimulation of the bladder, therefore teaching the bladder to empty itself over time. Dr Xiao has performed this procedure for the past 3 years in China and recently at Beaumont Hospital in Michigan with astonishing results, and now Physicians from Children’s Healthcare of Atlanta, Emory University School of Medicine and Rollins School of Public Health at Emory University, along with the Spina Bifida Association of GA want to bring him to Atlanta to supervise a surgical study including ten children. This has been Nicole’s and my priority, and now this procedure can change a lot of families’ lives. But the first phase of this surgical study is not funded, and therefore we are in this alone. Based on a successful outcome of phase one, phase two and the surgical study of 100 more children would receive federal funding. So right now we have to raise $1.88 million to pay for the surgical study involving 10 children. We have included some more information on Spina Bifida and the Xiao Procedure. Please don’t hesitate to write with any questions you guys might have. As you probably noticed, there’s a big blue ‘DONATE NOW’ button on the welcome page of this site. Please, please, please give as much as you possibly can to help make this a reality for thousands of families and their children affected by Spina Bifida. We thank you and we love you. Boris and Nicole To learn more about Spina Bifida click HERE. Source/Source