Uplifting Stories

          For this week's blog, I decided to share about a story that I heard about while watching the news while sitting at Burger King eating lunch one day, about a month to two monts ago.  There was this 5 year old little girl that had leukemia and had suffered with it since she was a baby.  She was on her death bed and the doctors had told her parents that they had done everything they could do for their little girl.  None of the treatments that they were trying was helping her anymore.  The doctors also said that she would probably would not make it much longer.  As the parents preparing for the worst, they were informed of a research study going on that could possibly help their daughter live and it could possibly get rid of the cancer.  If the parents agreed to let their daughter be a part of the study, doctors would inject the little girl with a disabled form of the HIV/AIDS virus.  In the news interview that I watched, the parents said they did not agree to the treatment until they were given a 100% assurance that their daughter would not get HIV/AIDS.  The little girl went through the treatment, nearly died, but then emerged and is now cancer free!!!!!! She has been in complete remission for over seven months now (Grady, 2012)!! I love reading stories such as these because it provides hope to all of the people with cancer.  Hopefully there will be a cure found and established for cancer.  Research is a blessing, and most people do not realize how big of a blessing until they read stories like this.  I hope this blog post has been a blessing for you to read!!

References

 

Grady, Denise. (2012, December 9). In Girl’s Last Hope, Altered Immune Cells Beat Leukemia.  The New York Times. Retrieved fromhttp://www.nytimes.com/2012/12/10/health/a-breakthrough-against-leukemia-using-altered-t-cells.html?pagewanted=all&_r=0

My Personal Research Journey

          The topic that I have chosen that for the simulation in our class is quality in the early childhood field, specifically quality in childcare programs.  I have a personal goal to open my own childcare center and it to be of high-quality.  I learned about the importance of quality in childcare centers in my previous classes here at Walden.  I live in a small town in Arkansas, and there isn't many choices when it comes to childcare centers.  In one of my previous classes we had to do observations at childcare centers of some kind.  A requirement of the program was that it had to be NAEYC accredited.  I went to the NAEYC website and performed a search for all childcare programs within a 50 mile radius of where I live that a part of the NAEYC.  The results for my search was 0.  There are no NAEYC accredited childcare programs near me.  I found that this fact is a very sad one.  I chose quality as my topic for the simulation in this class because I believe that my community is in dire need of a high-quality program. 
          I enjoyed constructing the research chart last week! I learned so much, and it has already helped me as I begin understanding the research process.  I have never liked doing research that much because I never understood how to do it.  The only way that I knew how to do research was to go to a scholarly website and type in my topic and then I would go through the dreaded task of looking through article after article only to repeatedly find that they were not what I was looking for.  I did not like research at all.  However, the way that we were taught last week to read research articles and examine them has lifted the dreadful feeling that I get when thinking about research.  I know I still have a long ways to go, however I think that I am going to enjoy my journey.  I would appreciate any insights, idease, opinions, suggestions, comments, or concerns that any of my colleagues might have to offer.  I also want to say that I am here for all of my them throughout the next weeks of this course, and if I can be of any assistance please let me know.