thunderbolt

Each year around this time, our family comes together to begin raising money for the Cystic Fibrosis Foundation’s Great Strides Walk. This is the annual 5K walk that serves as our big fundraiser to help find a cure for cystic fibrosis (CF). Our family has lived with disease for 11 years, ever since that December afternoon when my son Jacob was diagnosed with CF. When I say “family,” I don’t just mean my wife, Julie, our daughter, Sophie, and Jacob. I mean my parents, siblings and their respective families, Julie parents, siblings and their families, plus the hundreds of aunts and uncles, cousins, 2 nd cousins, best friends and distant acquaintances from years past who have all given what they can to help us in our battle. These people, all of them, are family in some way. How else can you describe these people who have shown so much love and support for Jacob and our family? With every new Great Strides campaign comes the task of writing a new letter asking people for money. Some year

In the next day or two, I will begin my fundraising campaign for this year's Great Strides Walk in Valencia. We tried to come up with a new song for the Malchus family video, but each one chosen was either inappropriate, or Jacob nixed because he didn't want to "ruin" the song by having it become associated with CF. As Sophie will attest, these songs become reminders of what we're fighting for when we ask for donations. Because of past videos, Sophie can no longer listen to "Here Comes the Sun" or Springsteen's "Workin' On a Dream" because they make her heart hurt too much. For that same reason, we didn't use the perfectly suitable Bruno Mars song, "Count On Me." Jacob loves that track, thanks in part to its use in the animated film, A Turtle's Tale (a movie that his dad just happened to work on), and also because it's just a wonderful song. So, we chose to tweak last year's video (with the One Republic song