Day 2 of 30.

In 2010 I was deep into my studies in chiropractic school when the single greatest event to impact my life began to unfold. It truly feels like my life can be broken up into 2 time periods; just as the Pleistocene gave way to the Holocene, I have been living a life split between before Henley Hazel was diagnosed to after she was diagnosed.

Every single day I make decisions and have conversations and my brain will constantly put me in a certain place, with Henley being diagnosed as the place card for My Life Part 1 and My Life Part 2. I think that I've let My Life Part 2 drag on past it's relegated time. 

July 19, 2013.

Instead of giving way to a new era, I've allowed the impact of this date's gigantic wake blur the lines between My Life Part 1, 2, and 3. 

It is time to stare that moment of time in the face and allow myself to move on from the blurred lines and recognize My Life Part 3. The period of time in which I attack personal growth by acknowledging the pain that momentous period of time has caused me. In turn, I am going to use that growth to raise money for something I care about deeply; the Henley Romine BEElieve Foundation. 

In order to keep Henley ever present in our lives, for the month of July, in honor of our Brave Bee and her upcoming Heavenly Birthday, I am challenging myself to write every single day as part of the Do Thirty challenge. 30 days. No guidelines or plans, some things I'll share and some I'll keep to myself. The goal is to initiate personal growth that pours over into the community by raising money to fund special Buzz Around Indy trips for other families dealing with the same unthinkable realities that our family dealt with. 

This challenge may appear easy on the surface. I get it. But for me, it will be a big challenge. In my past I really enjoyed writing, but as the years have gone on and people have urged me to write to help deal with stress and anxiety, I found myself feeling overwhelmed with getting started and choosing how to go about it. My perfectionist personality told me that if I did sit down and write something worthy of a New York Times Best Seller or a Pulitzer Prize then what's the point?

The point is this; I am doing this for me. For personal growth. When I grow, others grow because I am more prepared to serve. Sometimes I feel guilty how I feel, like I shouldn't grieve as much as I do because Henley wasn't mine, she wasn't my daughter. That is probably why I tend to tuck my emotions deep into the dark crevices of by soul and recesses of my brain where no one can access them. But she was mine, she wasn't just my niece. She was so much more. She was my kindred spirit, someone I could literally sense and feel things for before anyone else. Here's a perfect example; one evening we were at the hospital hanging out with Henley and family which was so commonplace for us. It was close to Thanksgiving and Kelly and I were excited for a "Friendsgiving" we had been invited to. This was going to allow us to connect with friends that we had not seen for quite some time and I know Kelly was very excited. When it came time to leave the hospital to meet our friends, my gut was telling me we had to stay. Even though Henley was actually doing great and more alert than she had been all day, every ounce of my being was telling me that we could not leave. Kelly, being the most understanding and incredible human, agreed to stay a bit longer. Sure enough, we experience one of the scariest moments I can remember during Henley's arduous journey. Henley was given an adult dose of pain meds and "codes," turning blue and essentially dying in front of our eyes from an overdose before being revived by the staff. This is a night that haunts me to this day. A night that I have had dreams about many times since. It was an absolute nightmare. I can't begin to explain to the connection I felt to Henley. People always said that once I have my own kids it'll help out things into perspective. But it didn't. I have 2 boys that are my world, and I still feel like I lost a piece of my hea​rt.

I sincerely hope that my thoughts throughout these 30 days strike some sort of cord in others. I am going to likely touch on a lot of different subjects. Even more so, I hope that I can inspire others to help support the BEElieve Foundation so that we can impact lives in a huge way.

Please visit this GoFundMe page to help me raise enough money to change a few lives being ruined by childhood cancer. I sincerely thank you for reading and for helping.

I will absolutely be sharing more details about this, but for more information on the foundation I am supporting, click HERE