When you don’t know your life to be any other way, does that make the pain that punctuates it less detectable? The restrictions that limit it less confining? The setbacks that repeatedly threaten it less frustrating… or terrifying… or wholly unfair?
Luna knows no other life than the one that is punctuated by pain, limited by patient protocol, and threatened by unrelenting malignancy. At just nine months old, she was diagnosed with high-grade glioma brain cancer and began a 15-month regimen of chemotherapy right away. Halfway through, her doctors discovered a second mass on her brain and she immediately underwent surgery. Six weeks later, the tumor had returned, bigger than before. Months - and then years - that followed would be peppered with biopsies, surgeries, and multiple rounds of chemotherapy in a constant race to beat back the rapid growth and spread of tumors.
Luna is now five. And the childhood developmental milestones she’s achieved - scooting on knees before taking first steps, babbling first words before uttering full sentences, playing peek-a-boo before playing pretend - all happened in the hospital. It was her home away from home, but it looked, sounded, and smelled nothing like home. It was the safest place for her, but also the place associated with the most suffering. It was her normal. But it was nowhere near normal.
And yet... all that time, in that place, she did grow, and learn, and love. And LAUGH. She wasn’t distracting herself, or “using” humor, or being joyful in spite of her circumstances — she was simply being a kid, doing what kids do, finding wonder and silliness without even trying.
Today, she still is. Being, doing, finding - all of it. But she still has to do it under mitigated conditions, which often means isolation, due to her compromised immune system.
Luna’s story illustrates in perfect, painful detail the “why” behind KLH Group’s signature impact event program: The KLH Clubhouse Build™. A place for imaginative and uninhibited play is vital, and for kids like Luna it must also be extraordinarily safe. Moreover, kids like Luna just need that place - free from tests and treatments, hospital stays, and talk of pathology and prognosis.
Partnering with some of the nation's most compassionate corporations, KLH has been hosting Clubhouse Builds™ in Charleston, SC, for years, but has recently begun offering an affiliate-style program where we take the whole shabang on the road to give clubhouses to brave kids like Luna in other communities. And this November, KLH is bringing a Clubhouse Build™ to the showroom floor of IMEX America in Las Vegas for hometown hero Luna. IMEX America is the premiere global meeting industry event and we were ecstatic to not only give Luna her very own clubhouse, but to demonstrate to event attendees the significance of the Clubhouse Build™ experience so we can help more warriors like Luna who are fighting chronic illnesses across the country receive their special sanctuaries.
Over three days of the conference, guests will have the chance to add a nail, swipe of paint, or a bit of muscle to the construction of Luna’s sweet sanctuary. What is usually crafted in a single afternoon will be stretched into a slow-motion transformation, with many hands making light work and many hearts blessing little walls.
This fall, Luna will start school. The next phase of her life will begin to frame another “normal.” And perhaps the way she sees the world around her and her place in it will begin to shift away from that which she’s known to this point. In this time of transition, that little door, those tiny flower boxes, that precious playspace... those will be hers to reclaim and retreat whenever she wants
