Go Ahead… Give Yourself a Real Treat This Month!

The month of October can be a spooky month, maybe even a scary month with monstrous problems. Yikes!! Well maybe not, but words like that seem to be popping up everywhere as kids and adults alike look forward to Halloween. In fact, according to the USA Today, adults spend more on themselves to celebrate Halloween than any other day during the year. I get that. Especially if they want to hang out with the kids to go trick or treating, or to a Halloween party of some kind. For many homeowners and home buyers though, they are truly scared. Scared to death of how in the world they are going to get out of their house and into their next one (the trick). My Treat: As a result of working with over 5,000 home buyers, sellers, renters and landlords over a 15-year time span, we have developed a special program to help home sellers and homebuyers. We will guarantee the sale of their present home at a price agreeable to them and in the unlikely event their home does not sell, we’ll buy it. Now that is a how you turn a trick into a real treat!

Vol 4, Issue 10, Oct 2018

In This Issue

— Give Yourself a Treat in this Month of Tricks
— Special LIFE TIME Guarantee You Can Share
— How Your Referrals Help the Kids
— And Much More…

AND remember… YOUR referrals help the Kids.

My heart breaks for many young people and families who will not be able to enjoy this fun time of the year out trick or treating or going to Halloween parties. As you know, tragedy falls on many in this life. Tragedies like sickness, cancers and other nasty diseases. We aim to do what we can to help kids who are unable to get out and have fun right now, due to these evil health problems. We are still on a mission to raise $25,000 for the Children’s Hospital Los Angeles Helping Hands Fund. We do this by donating to them a portion of our income from homes we sell. As you know Children’s Hospital Los Angeles does great work in helping kids fight through and survive nasty diseases like cancer, Non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma, leukemia and others. Kids under their care are 300% more likely to enter into remission IF they can get into the recovery center. BUT, the Recovery Center survives on Sponsorships and Donations. So YOUR REFERRALS REALLY DO HELP THE KIDS…

Who do you know considering buying or selling a home you could refer to my real estate sales team?

Not only will they benefit from our award winning service, but we donate a portion of our income on every home sale to Children’s Hospital Los Angeles Helping Hands Fund.

I want to make it easy to refer your friends, neighbors, associates or family members considering making a move. You can go to www.ReferralsHelpKids.com and enter their contact info on line or forward the link to who you know considering a move.

I hope you and your family are well and this month of tricks and treats is full of, well, treats. With all my appreciation.

Broker Associate, Realty Source Inc.

P.S. The story of this young person below may cause you to look at your loved ones differently. It did me. Check it out.

Over the last two decades of helping so many to sell their home and/or buy another, we have met some wonderful, loving, caring people. People like you! So your referrals, those you know considering a move, that we help – you can rest assured that not only will they get the award winning service we are known for and the guarantee to back it up, but that a solid portion of the income we receive from the transaction will go toward a very worthy cause.

It’s easy to refer those you know considering buying or selling a home. You can go to www.ReferralsHelpKids.com and enter their contact info on line or forward the link to who you know considering a move. Of course you can always call me direct as well at 213-880-9910.

Why I Support Children’s Hospital of Los Angeles

I grew up right here in Los Angeles. Born right nearby at St. Francis Hospital. I remember when I first heard about a young person close to our family suffering from a nasty disease and getting treated for that at Children’s Hospital Los Angeles. It was then that I began to pay closer attention to the work they do at that hospital. Since then, I have learned that it is a collection of hard working health care professionals, most making their home right here in the Los Angeles area, all coming together for a common cause. That cause is to help young people over come unfortunate health issues that life sometimes throws our way. Being a Los Angeles area, California native, I take pride in supporting in any way that I can the good work these people do at Children’s. My team rally’s around our annual goal of raising money and donating portions of our income to help Children’s in their quest to heal young people when they need healing. My team and I are committed to providing outstanding results for buyers and sellers referred to us by our past clients. I have discovered that Children’s Hospital Los Angeles shares similar commitments to their patients. And since their services survive on sponsorships and donations we are happy to contribute and proud to support them.

213-880-9910
Your Home Sold Guaranteed or I’ll Buy It*
coreychambers@yahoo.com
www.GuaranteedSaleSoCal.com

She Is Tessa, Hear Her Roar

Urged on by a mantra started by her parents, Tessa fought like a tiger to overcome leukemia.

It was an innocent question, one for which Meredith had the good fortune of not knowing the answer—otherwise she wouldn’t have asked it: “What are labs?” After a week of fever for her 4-year-old daughter, Tessa, the usual pediatric culprits—strep, ear infection—had been exonerated, so her pediatrician ordered labs, explaining that labs were merely a simple blood draw. “Now I look back and laugh,” Meredith says. “I didn’t know what labs were. I didn’t know anything about anything—then.” Then wasn’t destined to last much longer. The test results showed that Tessa’s white blood cell count was low, leading automatically to the presumption that she had a virus, which would run its course. When the fever and low white count persisted, the pediatrician escalated the case. An infectious disease specialist, noting Tessa’s chapped lips and red eyes, was suspicious of Kawasaki disease, but an echocardiogram turned up nothing. Next came a referral to a pediatric rheumatologist, who laid out Tessa’s condition squarely. “She said, ‘There are two explanations,'” Meredith recounts. “‘There’s something in her body killing off white blood cells, or something in her body is not producing white blood cells. You need to figure out which one of those two it is.'” The second scenario would mean cancer, as the aberrant leukemia cells impede the bone marrow’s ability to make normal white blood cells.

Confusing matters was Tessa’s cheerfulness. All along, the pediatrician had told Meredith she was not worried about leukemia, considering how vibrant and unaffected Tessa appeared. After the opinion of the rheumatologist, the pediatrician ordered a bone marrow biopsy. It came back inconclusive, so a second one was done three days later, leaving no ambiguity. The finding was acute lymphoblastic leukemia (ALL). That was a Friday, Oct. 9, 2015, and arrangements were made for Tessa to begin treatment at her local hospital the following Monday. Family members urged Meredith to bring her sooner to Children’s Hospital Los Angeles. The in-laws of one of her two sisters were friends with Robert Adler, MD, a pediatrician and chief medical officer for the CHLA Health System, and enlisted his help to get Meredith to act. Adler made a call to Meredith at 9 p.m. that Saturday night. He told her flatly that her daughter should not be at home. Meredith countered, remarking that Tessa was “literally playing soccer in the hallway with her brother” and appeared fine. Adler wouldn’t have it. “No,” he said. “Your daughter has leukemia. You need to bring her to the hospital.” His message got through, and Meredith and her husband, Brett, brought Tessa to CHLA the next morning. “I was devastated,” she says. “I don’t want to ever go back to how those 48 hours felt, between Friday finding out and Sunday morning admitting her to the hospital.” Her outlook was revived Monday morning when the family awoke to what Meredith is convinced was no random act of scheduling. Her other sister volunteers at Dream Street, a summer camp for kids battling illness, and has made friends with several of the CHLA nurses who also volunteer at Dream Street— including the one in the hospital’s Infusion Center who was stationed at the desk outside Tessa’s room that first morning. It struck Meredith as too powerful to be coincidental, but was rather a surefire instance of cosmic intervention. “It was like a sign someone sent you: You’re not doing this alone,” she says. “Despite this horrible thing that you have to go through, there’s someone making sure you’re going to be OK. And I’m not religious at all, in any way, but that was not accidental. There was no way that that wasn’t the universe saying, ‘We haven’t forgotten you. We haven’t put you somewhere that you can’t handle. We’re going to get you through this.'”

Courtesy Children’s Hospital Los Angeles

After antibiotics subdued Tessa’s fever, she began treatment for ALL, starting with blitzing the leukemia cells with an intense 30 days of intravenous and oral chemotherapy, under the care of CHLA oncologist Jacquelyn Baskin, MD, who was on service the day Tessa arrived in the Emergency Department. Tessa passed the critical first marker: A bone marrow biopsy after the first month of chemotherapy found no evidence of leukemia. She was in remission. She would receive rigorous treatment for the next several months, a period called consolidation in which the regimen of chemotherapy continues, aiming to kill off any dormant leukemia cells that weren’t zapped in the initial 30 days. Regular lumbar punctures searched for any abnormal cells lurking in the spine. In June 2016, Tessa advanced to the lengthy maintenance phase, reducing the weekly trips to the hospital for intravenous chemo to monthly, while continuing to take oral chemo medication at home. Meredith says outside of a lot of fatigue, Tessa bore up well. Nausea was minimal and the hair loss didn’t faze her. It was the concurrent regimen of steroids that had the worst effects. “It made her cranky, it made her angry, it made her moody—and hungry,” Meredith says. “Steroids make you so hungry. She was doing five days of steroids every month. It started on a Thursday and would go till Tuesday. We would plan our life around it: If it’s a steroid weekend, don’t make any plans.” Brett recalls a moment at the hospital early on, awaiting one of Tessa’s first lumbar punctures. She was in the midst of her program of steroids but couldn’t eat prior to the procedure. “She was like a ravenous bear,” he says. “I’ll never forget being in the waiting room and she’s just going bananas. She’s yelling and screaming at us how hungry she is. This other family, with a boy—I think he was a month or two ahead of Tessa on the protocol—they look over and say, ‘It will get better.'” To get Tessa through the roughest parts of treatment, Meredith and Brett came up with a motto. They called their daughter a tough tiger. “Tessa, you can do it,” they would implore. “You’re a tough tiger.” Brett, who works for Warner Bros. in film distribution, is a winemaker on the side. In 2016 he developed a rosé he named Pink Tiger, a nod to Tessa’s dogged spirit as well as her favorite color. A graphic des

A graphic designer friend created the label for the wine, setting white paw prints on a background of pink tiger stripes. On the backside, Brett wrote a blurb that mentioned his daughter’s health crisis and shouted out “all of the tough tigers out there” fighting leukemia. “These kids, the way they handle it, it leaves you in awe,” he says. “They just deal like you wouldn’t imagine. They carry on.” The label also notes that all money from sales of the wine is donated to “one of the world’s greatest cancer-fighting institutions, Children’s Hospital Los Angeles.” Last year, that sum turned out to be $1,500 after Brett sold the 20-odd cases of Pink Tiger within two days, mostly to family and friends in Southern California. Warner Bros. kicked in another $1,000, bringing the total contribution to $2,500. This year, with an increase in the price of a bottle, he’s hoping to reach $3,500. “Tessa knows this is her wine,” he says. “When we bottled the 2016—the first vintage of this—she and I went to the winery; she was right there with me. When we saw those first bottles coming around the conveyor belt, it was really special.” Tessa took her final oral chemotherapy tablet on Feb. 9, 2018, ending her leukemia treatment. For the time being, she returns to CHLA every eight weeks so Baskin can check her blood cell counts and examine her for anything out of the ordinary. “If all those things are negative and she’s doing fine at home, then the concern for relapse is low,” Baskin says. Since going off the medication, Tessa, now 7, has her old juice back. “It’s like someone took a pound of bricks off her shoulders,” Meredith says. “Before, we’d go somewhere and she’d say, ‘I don’t want to walk. It’s too far.’ Now the kid dances everywhere she goes. She’s a different child.” Meredith is changed as well. She has had her fill of turbulence and now aspires to nothing beyond humdrum. “If you can give me routine for the rest of my life, I’ll take it. I don’t need anything exciting. I just want to get up every day, drop my kids off at school, go to work, come home and make them dinner. The stresses of everyday life are a godsend.” Recently, a friend at Brett’s job gave him a pink-tiger stuffed animal to pass on to Tessa. She walks around all day clutching it. She’ll outgrow it. But the backstory will endure. “Absolutely,” Meredith says. “She is a tough tiger. She will forever be a tough tiger.”

To help kids just like Tessa, refer a friend at www.ReferralsHelpKids.com or call Corey 213-880-9910.

Copyright © This free information provided courtesy SoCal Home Blog with information provided by Corey Chambers, Realty Source Inc, BRE#01889449. Story and images courtesy Children’s Hospital Los Angeles. For more information, contact (888) 240-2500 or visit www.ReferralsHelpKids.com Licensed in California. All informanewtion provided is deemed reliable but is not guaranteed and should be independently verified. Properties subject to prior sale or rental. This is not a solicitation if buyer or seller is already under contract with another broker.

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