Joshy Ford, 4, who is an ambassador for the Stop & Shop/Memorial Sloan Kettering child cancer campaign, with his parents Joshua and Vanessa Ford in Fresh Meadows
The Ford Family
A 4-year-old Fresh Meadows boy who survived cancer has been named as an ambassador for an annual cancer campaign conducted by Stop & Shop and Memorial Sloan Kettering (MSK).
Joshy Ford, who beat kidney cancer, will have his face on billboards at Stop & Shop stores as a means to raise money and create awareness of childhood cancer. The campaign, which Joshy is prominently part of, has been running annually for over two decades each March in all Stop & Shop locations. The campaign calls on customers to round up the total of their purchase to the nearest dollar with all proceeds going directly to MSK cancer research.
Joshy’s journey to become part of the campaign has been a tough one. He was just five months old when he was diagnosed with a rare type of kidney cancer that required him to have his left kidney removed. However, the cancer returned soon after and he was treated at the MSK cancer care unit requiring his adrenal glands to be removed.
The 4-year-old is proud to be featured in the campaign, said Joshua Ford, Joshy’s dad.
“Joshy is excited because he knows that he is spreading an important message for all kids with cancer,” Ford said.
Ford and his wife, Vanessa, said that it is a humbling and amazing experience for their son to be chosen as one of the faces for the campaign, adding that Joshy is now two years cancer free.
Ford added that he hopes Joshy can help raise awareness for the many children living with cancer and that he makes it clear that it is not as rare as many may think.
“One of the things we want to eradicate is the word ‘rare.’ You hear that a lot when it comes to pediatric cancer but for Vanessa and I when we were in MSK with Joshy, there were so many other kids there, so the word ‘rare’ doesn’t exist in our world,” he said.
Ford added…
Read the full article here
Leave a Reply