My Daughter Was A Lemonade Hero

Our precious Alexandra was born in Manchester, Connecticut on January 18, 1996, the second of our four children. Two days before her first birthday she was diagnosed with Neuroblastoma, a type of childhood cancer. On her first birthday, the doctors informed us that if she beat her cancer, she might never walk again. Faced with this grim possibility we were beside ourselves but Alex fought on. Two weeks later to our amazement, we asked her to kick and she slightly moved her leg.

By her second birthday she was crawling and able to stand up with leg braces. Alex was very determined and worked hard to gain strength and to learn how to walk. We thought she was beating this until we discovered within the next year that her tumors had started growing.

In 2000, when Alex was four years old, she came up with the idea to set up a lemonade stand while at Connecticut Children's Medical Center for a stem cell transplant. She just asked Liz (her mother) and I out of nowhere if she could hold a stand when she got out of the hospital. She said:

"I don't want to keep the money, I want to give it to the hospital to help them find a cure for cancer." At this point Alex had been in treatment for over 3 years and the treatments were not working and she knew that. We told her that it would be difficult to raise a lot of money at 50 cents a glass but she wanted to do it anyway.

Alex set up her first lemonade stand outside our house. It was held once a year and she set it up with the help of her brothers, Patrick (11) and Eddie (7).