Who could have predicted a tiny baby with a ten-percent chance of survival, would grow up to help thousands of families get through what her family experienced?
That baby, from a lifetime ago now, is Helping Families Handle Cancer founder Carie Stock. She’s now a woman, still sometimes dealing with the decades-old interventions used to save her back then. Her mom, Robyn, is amazed that Carie doesn’t dwell on her hardships, she sees others needing more help than she does.
Robyn was pregnant with her soon-to-be-born son, when she learned her 13-month-old daughter had a rare and aggressive cancer that needed immediate treatment and extensive surgery. Even with the medical intervention, baby Carie’s odds of surviving were ten percent. “There was so little data available for this specific cancer,” recalled Robyn. “They told me back then that if she’d been diagnosed (with Rhabdomyosarcoma) even ten years earlier, there wouldn’t be a chemotherapy treatment plan available.”
While science made Carie’s survival possible, it didn’t make it easy. Months in the hospital, years of chemo, and surgeries to follow in faraway Toronto, made the rest of life’s trials exponentially harder.
Back then, Robyn was a single mom drowning in bills when, “An amazing social worker saw that we were going through financial hardship. as I was spending all my time at Carie’s beside.” At the time, there were some government services that stepped in to help with childcare, parking and fuel. These are items that government agencies no longer provide funding for.
Who could have predicted a tiny baby with a ten-percent chance of survival, would grow up to help thousands of families get through what her family experienced?
In 2008 Carie started Helping Families Handle Cancer and has since been awarded the Terry Fox Humanitarian Award, Avenue Magazine’s Top 40 under 40, Global TV’s Woman of Vision, and the Queen’s Jubilee Medal.
Today, Helping Families has reached an incredible milestone of providing $2,000,000 in financial support to 4,160 families (and counting!). Every dollar has helped families get through the most difficult experience imaginable, caring for a critically ill child.
Some photographs capture a moment. Others capture the beginning of a legacy.
The illustration anchoring this story is based on a photo taken of Carie standing in her crib, wrapped in a blue blanket, with her teddy bear. The crib mobile subtly incorporates an element from the charity’s logo.
The artist, Jena Rhydderch, from Bestow Gifts, took that heartbreaking and heartwarming photo of Carie in her crib and combined it with her story, bringing it into the future by adding the thousands of families that this little girl would go on to support during difficult times.
“It seems to me that Carie really has a purpose in life,” said Robyn. “Many of us don’t know what our purpose is, but Carie has used adversity and challenges in her life as fuel to drive her passion to help others.”
This art piece is a celebration of the extraordinary impact one life can have when hardship is transformed into hope, and a tribute to the thousands of families who have found support during their child’s cancer journey.
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