Georgia lady's most cancers battle evokes $20 million donation - Story

ATLANTA (FOX 5 Atlanta) – It has been precisely one 12 months since Benji and Lee Anna Hollis of Buford, Georgia, mentioned good bye to their oldest daughter Anna Charles at Kids’s Healthcare of Atlanta.

“It is a exhausting day, it may be exhausting to be again contained in the hospital,” Lee Anna Hollis says.
“We left that hospital with out her on September 16th, however we’re going again on September 16th,” Benji Hollis provides ”  And, it is superb what can occur in a 12 months, by means of love.”

As a result of their 6-year previous, who typically glided by the nickname “A.C.” has now impressed one of many greatest presents in Kids’s historical past. The Peach Bowl donated $20 million {dollars} to Kids’s Healthcare of Atlanta to create the Peach Bowl LegACy Fund, to honor Anna Charles.

Her leukemia prognosis, within the spring of 2018, turned her household’s world the wrong way up.
Three days after they acquired phrase Anna Charles had acute myeloid leukemia, or AML, she got here out of emergency surgical procedure to take away a mass of cells from her backbone unable to really feel or transfer her legs.

“She went from this wholesome baby to leukemia, to acute myeloid leukemia, to a wheelchair,” Benji Hollis says. “We simply saved free-falling.”

That is when the Hollises discovered themselves contained in the world of childhood most cancers.

“If you do not have a sick baby, or a toddler affected by it, you are scared to look in that window,” her father says.

However on the within, Benji Hollis says, they noticed way more than they ever anticipated.

“There’s hope, and love, and other people caring for one another,” Hollis says. “They will see resilient, sturdy, superb kids.”

But, the Hollises additionally a discovered an actual lack of cutting-edge therapy choices for youths like Anna Charles.
Many of the most cancers medication and therapies had been developed for adults. Solely 4% of federal most cancers analysis funding goes to childhood most cancers.

“We’d like mother and father concerned,” Benji Hollis says. “We’d like mother and father of youngsters which can be wholesome.  We’d like all of them to get entangled. As a result of they’re all our youngsters.”

Benji Hollis is the Vice President of Gross sales for the Chik-fil-A Peach Bowl, and his household’s wrestle impressed his coworkers to create the LegACy Fund, which is able to hyper give attention to funding essentially the most promising most cancers medication and coverings for youngsters with AML.

“The truth that that is going to go particularly to pediatric analysis that might presumably have saved our baby and will save so many different kids, that’s, it is superb,” Lee Anna Hollis says.  “It is completely superb.”

Ultimately, Anna Charles’ most cancers batter lasted simply 5 months. Benji Hollis says they lived day by day with “intention,” hanging on to each minute as a household.

“It was about her, it was about Everlee (Anna Charles’ little sister), it was about one another,” he says.
Anna Charles died peacefully September 16, 2018, surrounded by the individuals who liked her.
They’d been getting ready for radiation and a bone marrow transplant when her coronary heart failed.

“Up till the final day, we held out hope,” Benji Hollis says.   “I’ll sit right here right this moment and let you know, we’re nonetheless holding out hope, for the opposite kids and their households.”

Lee Anna Hollis hopes the LegACy Fund will assist researchers and clinicians discover remedies that may save generations of youngsters to come back.

“We will assist,” Hollis says.  “She’s going to assist another person.”

Anna Charles, her mother and father say, would have liked that.

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