Dear Friends and Family,

We are thrilled to announce that we have been given the opportunity to participate in the Leukemia and Lymphoma Society’s (LLS), “Students of the Year” campaign!

Students of the Year is a seven-week fundraising competition for high school students. It is a chance for students to raise funds in the hope of finding a cure for patients with blood cancer. The student(s) who raise the most funds at the end of the seven weeks receives a $2,500 college scholarship! The competition starts on January 19, 2019 and ends March 9, 2019. We are determined to reach our $30,000 goal with our dream of becoming one step closer to finding a cure for our friends and people like them who are battling this awful disease!

For more than 68 years, LLS has invested more than $1 billion to advance cancer therapies and saving lives. Many LLS supported therapies not only help blood cancer patients, but are now approved to treat patients with rare forms of autoimmune diseases. Some of these therapies are even being tested on other forms of cancer.

We have had the same six best friends since middle school. We are inseparable. But during our 8th grade year, something tragic happened, our best friend Jane Finley was diagnosed with Hodgkin's Lymphoma. As teenagers, her diagnosis was eye-opening for us, after seeing our closest friend through so much pain. After celebrating her fight and victory against cancer, we were heartbroken to find out, on her birthday, she had relapsed. This time the fight was even harder, and the treatments even more severe.Jane spent over a month quarantined in the hospital receiving a stem cell transplant. We were overjoyed when she got out of the hospital and we could attend our first homecoming dance together.

Not even a year later, our sophomore year, we once again received news that shattered our world. Our other best friend Claire, who has been with us throughout Jane’s journey, now had her own battle to fight. She was diagnosed with Acute Lymphoblastic Leukemia a few days after her sixteenth birthday. For the past year, Claire has been in and out of the hospital, confined in her house from fear of becoming sick, and kept away from school, as she fights this excruciating disease. Watching two of our best friends face incredible odds, and fight for their lives has made us determined to contribute in any way possible. The chance for the three of us to be apart of this rewarding opportunity to help Claire, Jane, and others who have been affected by cancer is the most heartwarming and exciting opportunity we could ask for. After supporting Jane as she became Student of the Year allowed us to see how compassionate and charitable our community, friends, and family truly were. She inspired us to step up and represent Bay as candidates, in hopes of furthering progress to a cure for blood cancer everywhere.

If you would like to make an online donation please visit our website https://events.lls.org/noh/nohSOY19/tfightforf . If you wish to donate through the mail, please make your check payable to The Leukemia and Lymphoma Society using the enclosed, pre-addressed envelope (61111 oak tree Blvd suite 130 independence oh 44131). Please print our team name, “Fight for Friends”, in the memo section.
Your donations are tax-deductible.
 

Sincerely,

Leila Psota, Mary Kate Price, Olivia Doland
Team Fight for Friends