A Letter from Stephen

I wanted to share some of Stephen's voice with all of you, and with help, was able to come up with a letter he'd written to his friends during that last winter so many years ago.  I'd intended to edit it a bit, but found myself unable to remove a single word. 


Maybe better than anything I've been able to express, or his friends have been able to convey, this letter illustrates how strong, unflaggingly hopeful, and downright funny this kid was.


Happy St. Patrick's Day, Stephen.  We love you, we miss you, and we did all of this -- for YOU.

Dear Hendy,

Hi! It's Steve again. I just wrote to see how everything was going down at school. Well? How is it? Anyway, I'm doing fine. It's January 30^th, and I'm still bumming about the Chargers losing the Super Bowl (Which I knew they would anyway!) Tomorrow I'm going to the hospital for my last chemo-therapy treatment. I'll be staying there for 4 or 5 days, and then the long trip home. Then, about early to mid-March, I will be getting my radiation treatment. To do that, I will have to stay in a hotel for about two months and visit the hospital two times a day, 5 days a week. So in other words, I won't be home for my birthday, maybe even Easter, in that case.

I suppose you are wondering what radiation is. Actually, I don't know exactly what it is either, but I'll do my best to explain. I guess some sort of X-ray, but it doesn't take pictures of my head. The doctors measure up my head and then mark it all up with a marker, so I'm gonna be some little bald kid with green Crayola all over my head. They said that they might put a little tattoo on each side of my head, too. No, I don't mean skull and crossbones, either. They're just going to take a needle and hot ink and put a little spot on the sides of my head so they know where to place the radiation rays. If they keep shooting the rays in the same spots, I guess its suppose to freeze up or burn up the tumor cells and all the bad cells around it. If it does that, then I can go home and hopefully be the kid I use to be! (Well, maybe a little more normal, and less ugly... MAYBE NOT!)

So that's pretty much all that is going on around here. Besides that, nothing's really happened around here... except that the Chargers just lost the Super Bowl, and that I just pulled a $25.00 Emmitt Smith football card out of a pack of Fleer Ultra 94's. I'd be happy to hear from you guys sometime again, so for those of you who don't know my address, here it is: [redacted]

I hope you can find the time to write, and would like to hear from you out there that haven't written yet, so I'll see you, and hopefully hear from you later.

With love,

Stephen Haslett

P.S. I have grown an inch taller and gained 7 pounds since I started treatment. In other words... I'M GROWING!

To donate to St. Baldrick's in honor of Stephen, click HERE!