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I sit quietly and contemplatively as I write this, especially in a year when we honor survivors.

For many years, I have ridden in memory of children who have passed. Often, I have personally known those children, known their stories, and carried their impact with me up every mile of that climb. Their lives matter. Their stories matter. They always will.

But more than anything, I ride for my own child.

I ride for the one who heroically survived. The one whose story I have told a thousand times and will never tire of telling. It is the story that first brought me to this ride, and it is the reason I return to the top of the pass year after year.

It never gets easier.

It doesn’t get easier to ask for donations.
It doesn’t get easier to sit waiting  for annual checkups results.

It doesn’t get easier to remember what happened.

We will always be called survivors — and I say that with both pride and profound gratitude. This year marks Year 11 of survival.

On June 6, 2014, we walked into Children’s Hospital Colorado thinking it was a follow up on a pretty normal concern. Instead, we stepped through the double doors of the Center for Cancer and Blood Disorders and into a world that would become our home for nearly ten months.

After an specific diagnosis that took time and his health condition taking quickly along with a failed first attempt to bring Daniel’s complex leukemia (APML) into remission, we learned he would need a bone marrow transplant. An anonymous donor — our angel — became the lifeline that gave Daniel his second chance at life. But that miracle came only after long grueling rounds of chemotherapy. It all took it's toll. 

Daniel endured severe weight loss, muscle atrophy, adverse drug reactions, and pain that no child should have to experience. Yet perhaps one of the hardest battles was the isolation — nearly ten months of hospital life. For a teenager, the social loss is almost indescribable. For his mother, who never left his side, it was a world reduced to hospital walls and fragile hope.

We would not have made it without the relentless support of the hospital staff and the incredible Wellness Program funded by this Wheels community. That program helped preserve Daniel’s spirit when everything else was being tested. I am convinced it played a vital role in helping him keep fighting.

Survival is a complicated thing.

When you first walk through those hospital doors, survival is the only thing you want. When you finally walk out, you believe you achieved your goal. But the truth is more layered than that. Some of us ring a bell. Some throw a party. Some quietly mark the date on a calendar. But all of us now live with “BC” and “AC” — Before Cancer and After Cancer. And they are distinctly two worlds that could not be more removed from each other.  

We may not have served in a formal war, but do not doubt that we have seen battle.

Our children are warriors. As parents, we are too. The scars run deep — visible and invisible. There is trauma. There is PTSD. There is celebration mixed with triggers now. Gratitude intertwined with survivor’s guilt. I know,  I live with both. Even in joy, there is a quiet awareness of how close we came to losing everything.

Daniel fought from a single-digit percentage chance of survival — and he survived.

For that, I will dedicate my life to giving back to those who saved him.

If you are able, please consider giving what you can. Your support funds critical, often underfunded research that leads to better treatments and cures. It also sustains programs like the Wellness Team — the very program that helped save Daniel’s spirit so his body could keep fighting.

Because survival is not just about living.

It’s about helping others have the chance to live too.