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Who are you climbing in honor/in memory of? Request your dedication sign here!
Meet our 2015 Honored Heroes
 Joshua & Jude Cobler
On Jude Cobler’s fourth day of kindergarten, he came home
with a 105 degree fever and was brought to the emergency room. The next day,
the Cobler family learned that Jude had leukemia. An ambulance transported him
to Children’s Medical Center of Dallas where he spent three days in intensive
care and another three on the Center for Cancer and Blood Disorders floor.
After ICU, Jude went through a lot of blood draws and procedures and they
started chemo right away.
In his second month of treatment, Jude wasn’t
responding to chemotherapy and his cancer was getting worse - he needed a bone
marrow transplant. Being half-Caucasian and half-Filipino, it would’ve been
very difficult for Jude to find a bone marrow donor. The bone marrow registry consists of mostly Caucasian donors, with other
races having much fewer donors. Multiracial people seeking out a donor have the
worst possible chances of finding a donor, as bone marrow matching relies
heavily on ethnicity. Because of the lack of diversity and overall lack of donors,
many patients, including children, aren’t able to get the bone marrow they need
to survive.
They soon found out that Jude’s older brother, Joshua, was a
perfect match. The hospital made arrangements for the bone marrow transplant to
take place just two days before Christmas.
Jude is now almost three and a half
years in remission. He just finished third grade at All Saints Catholic School
and is living as normal as every 9 year old boy!
Chief Tittle
First Responders Honored Hero
On September 1, 2011, Chief Tittle was promoted to Chief of
Department for the Lewisville Fire Department. In late 2012/early 2013, he
started noticing that he felt winded very easily while doing normal, everyday
tasks. After some out-of-the-ordinary
bruises wouldn’t go away in a normal time frame, Chief Tittle realized that he
needed to go to the doctor. The next day, doctors told Chief Tittle that he had
leukemia. Two hours later, he checked into the hospital to begin treatment
immediately.
After five and a half weeks in the hospital that included oral
chemotherapy and intravenous chemo, he was released and was able to go home. He
still had another four weeks of outpatient chemo treatments and twice weekly
visits for blood draws before he could go back to work for half days, be around
his guys again, and get back to some sort of normalcy.
“I still feel I am
going through this journey for a reason, and I want it to be a positive one
with something good coming out of it in the end.” – Chief Tittle
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