This year I ride in honor of Jaden Ramsey.
Jaden was diagnosed with osteosarcoma on April 2, 2020 when he was a senior at East High School in Cheyenne, Wyoming where he was involved in Air Force JROTC, football, and wrestling. He had just completed his senior season of wrestling when he was diagnosed.
Despite his diagnosis and the COVID-19 pandemic, Jaden proudly walked across the stage to receive his high school diploma in June of 2020, in the midst of his treatment.
Jaden had plans to join the Air Force and become a fighter pilot which were derailed by his cancer diagnosis.
Jaden had a zest for learning and was very proud to be an ambassador for STEM learning when his passion for all things cars took hold.
In eighth grade, Jaden was interviewed by Consumer Reports after entering a design competition with an idea for a high-performance super car that ran on green energy, which caught the attention of engineering faculty at MIT. At the time of his death, Jaden was making plans to pursue a degree in mechanical engineering and create his own car company.
Jaden endured grueling treatments and surgeries until he laid down his sword on April 18th, 2021, shortly after his 19th birthday and almost exactly one year after his diagnosis. February 17th, Jaden would have turned 23.
He was kind, goofy and compassionate and was less concerned with what others thought of him and more about how he could make others laugh and be happy.
From the moment he was diagnosed, he was passionate about raising awareness and finding a cure for childhood cancer. His dying wish was to donate his body to research so that, as he said many times, “no other kid and no other family has to go through this.” In addition, he was a registered organ and tissue donor, and he donated his corneas to help two individuals overcome corneal blindness.
My personal connection with Children’s Hospital began in September of 2020 when my daughter Amanda was diagnosed with osteosarcoma.
Amanda is currently attending University of Oregon and is thriving however, she needs to be followed by Children’s oncology periodically for 10 years as osteosarcoma is a very aggressive cancer that has a very bad habit of relapsing…especially in the lungs.
Amanda’s tumor was in the top of her tibia. Her surgery to remove the tumor involved removing the top of her tibia and fibula and bottom of her femur which translates to an entire knee replacement plus additional bone being removed versus bone that is removed in a “standard” knee replacement.
She now has titanium “hardware” where the bone used to be. With this, she cannot jump or run and her hardware has a fairly short lifespan and is expected to need to be replaced about every 15 years. She is afraid to ski (which she used to LOVE doing) and to do other activities that kids her age love to do because any fall could cause the hardware to break.
Additionally, Amanda’s hearing and heart need to be checked periodically post-treatment. This is because the chemotherapy that is given for osteosarcoma can seriously damage hearing AND heart function.
Amanda also needed to undergo lung surgery because there were a few concerning spots in her lungs and osteosarcoma has a very bad habit of metastasizing to the lungs. We were extremely fortunate that the parts of the lungs which they removed were not cancerous, yet the surgery and difficult post recovery is of course something we would have preferred for our 17 year old daughter to not have to endure.
Of all the families with a child with osteosarcoma that I connected with during Amanda’s treatment, the majority of those kids are not still here with us.
Clearly, better treatment options need to be found for osteosarcoma (found more frequently in pediatric patients than adults) and for every other type of pediatric cancer so that these kids need not endure so much pain and suffering and so that none of the diagnoses carry a death sentence.
Of course the ultimate goal is to find a cure but in the meantime, we need to find ways to make the outlook for all these kids SO much better.
Only 4% of all federal funding for cancer research goes to studies on pediatric cancers.
Wheels of Justice, the Courage Classic team I ride with, raises money exclusively for the cancer center at Children’s Hospital.
