Community comes together to support child cancer patients with 95.5 WSB Care-A-Thon

Every day, 47 children are diagnosed with cancer in the United States. The WSB community is coming together to support kids with cancer at Children’s Healthcare of Atlanta.

Channel 2′s Linda Stouffer showed how the annual 95.5 WSB Care-a-Thon makes a difference.

The Lott family started a special trip to travel to all 50 states around the country starting in 2020, but in 2022, they told Channel 2 Action News they had to “slam the breaks” on those plans after just 36 states.

That’s when their six-year-old daughter, Linnea, was diagnosed with cancer.

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Linnea’s parents told Stouffer that she was a happy little kid, traveling with her family around the nation until her dad said she got a bump on her forehead.

“It was kind of unusual, we had a biopsy,” David Lott said. “She was diagnosed with leukemia.”

“We learned that Linnea had near haploid ALL, which is a very rare and difficult-to-treat type of leukemia,” Christy Lott, her mother, said. “We chose to start her treatment at Children’s Healthcare of Atlanta at the Egleston campus, since that’s where her grandmother was a nurse for many years, so it just felt like home to me.”

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Eventually, Ms. Lott said the family found a home in Suwanee to settle down.

“We feel so lucky to have found a supportive community and an amazing group of friends. Linnea is responding well to treatment and was able to start kindergarten in 2023,” Ms. Lott told Channel 2 Action News.

This spring, Channel 2 Action News was the first to show you high-tech construction inside the new Aflac Cancer Center at the Arthur M. Blank Hospital, a $1.5 billion facility for child patients, and now it’s almost ready to open.

Doctors told Stouffer that they’ll be able to customize cancer treatments for their patients on-site, saying they’re able to “train the cells to kill the cancer cells and then re-infusing” with extremely clean circumstances.

It helps the doctors create more happy moments like these, marking the end of treatment.

Linnea got a little shy, but her family got to ring the bell for her, showing they fought her cancer together and reached the end of treatment.

Her family said they’re proud of how far she’s come.

“It’s amazing seeing everything she went through. She can still be a normal kid and still have gone through all that,” Mr. Lott said.

Linnea will now start her first-grade year healthy and cancer-free.

The new hospital, with more beds and next-level cancer care, opens at the end of September.

In the meantime, the 95.5 WSB Care-At-Thon starts Thursday, and you’ll hear how you can support the Aflac Cancer Center today and tomorrow on WSB Radio.

To learn how you can help, head online here.

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