The Emily Updates (Vol. 1): One Year in the Life of the Girl Who Lived
Seventeen years ago, when Vonne was 33 and Tom was 32, they were suddenly confronted with every parent’s worst medical “bolt from the blue”: their only child, 30-month-old Emily, was diagnosed with an advanced – meaning metastasized – pediatric cancer. At the time, Tom worked for a defense think tank in the Washington, DC area and Vonne was a largely stay-at-home mom prepping for a return to her earlier professional career.
What followed was the defining crisis of their now 25-year marriage: an intense 20-month battle to keep their first-born alive. About six months into the struggle, Tom started writing a weekly update on Emily’s progress (or lack thereof) for interested parties. Vonne contributed to this blog-like diary, and it was sent out by email, fax and regular mail to over one hundred relatives and friends. The couple started this diary because they tired of having to rehash all the details in phonecalls, but over time they came to view it as something more important – a real-time memoir that would someday prove crucial to Emily’s understanding of how she became whom Tom and Vonne hoped she would become.
Several things came together in the last couple of years to convince Tom and Vonne that now was the time to finally publish this amazing diary. First – and most obviously – has been the meteoric rise of eBooks themselves. After all, the Emily Updates basically constituted a blog before there were blogs. Second was Emily’s own matriculation into college, where she now majors in East Asian studies and English. Having made it to adulthood, Tom and Vonne felt the time was right for their family – and Emily herself – to share this story with the world.
The family now hails from the Indianapolis area, and besides 19-year-old Emily – the girl who lived, it boasts five additional children: sons Kevin (16) and Jerome (11), an adopted Chinese daughter Vonne Mei (7), and adopted Ethiopian sisters Metsuwat (4) and Abebu (3). Would the Barnetts have achieved such a blended clan absent the early experiences of Emily’s cancer? Probably not. But yes, that’s perhaps another reason why they wanted to revisit this tumultuous early family chapter at this time. As Vonne now finally gets back to restarting her professional career, the couple wanted to take this moment to remember how they got here – or how the journey truly began.
What you are about to read in this series of eBooks are the original weekly updates as Tom wrote them – with
Vonne’s continuous inputs – across all of 1995 and into early 1996, a period encompassing the last 14 months of Emily’s treatment protocol. Those 45 updates constitute Chapters 3 through 9 in the series: Chapter 3, which concludes with the birth of our second child, in included in this volume; Chapters 4 and 5, which cover the difficult summer of 1995, make up Volume II; Chapters 6 and 7, which chronicle the family's final push on the chemotherapy, fill out Volume III; and Chapters 8 and 9, which encompass the post-treatment diagnostics – and Make a Wish trip to Disney World, constitute Volume IV.
The first two chapters presented in this volume are actually recreations of the events surrounding the initial
diagnoses (Chapter 1) and the beginning of in-hospital treatment (Chapter 2) in July of 1994. Tom put these
diary-like remembrances together in June of 1995 to mark the one-year anniversary of the diagnosis, and they are based on the voluminous medical records. Various stories concerning the period between those initial treatments and the beginning of the updates in January 1995 appear across most of the 45 updates.
Tom and Vonne haven’t made an effort to “improve” the updates from today’s perspective, feeling it was important to leave them in their raw, written-in-the-heat-of-battle state. Yes, they now claim to be wiser on a host of subjects, but a lot of that wisdom stems directly from these experiences, so they felt it made most sense to share them with you, the reader, in this unaltered format.
Once all of the updates are published as eBooks, Tom, Vonne will publish a fifth retrospective volume co-written with their daughter Emily. It explores our memories of those tumultuous events and how they've continued to shape their collective and individual lives ever since. The volume also includes commentary on the updates themselves, and provides general advice to parents facing similar crises in their family life.
If this series of eBooks helps you better understand an analogous past experience or ongoing crisis in your life, then Tom, Vonne and Emily have accomplished what they set out to do by sharing their intense story.
1114817509
What followed was the defining crisis of their now 25-year marriage: an intense 20-month battle to keep their first-born alive. About six months into the struggle, Tom started writing a weekly update on Emily’s progress (or lack thereof) for interested parties. Vonne contributed to this blog-like diary, and it was sent out by email, fax and regular mail to over one hundred relatives and friends. The couple started this diary because they tired of having to rehash all the details in phonecalls, but over time they came to view it as something more important – a real-time memoir that would someday prove crucial to Emily’s understanding of how she became whom Tom and Vonne hoped she would become.
Several things came together in the last couple of years to convince Tom and Vonne that now was the time to finally publish this amazing diary. First – and most obviously – has been the meteoric rise of eBooks themselves. After all, the Emily Updates basically constituted a blog before there were blogs. Second was Emily’s own matriculation into college, where she now majors in East Asian studies and English. Having made it to adulthood, Tom and Vonne felt the time was right for their family – and Emily herself – to share this story with the world.
The family now hails from the Indianapolis area, and besides 19-year-old Emily – the girl who lived, it boasts five additional children: sons Kevin (16) and Jerome (11), an adopted Chinese daughter Vonne Mei (7), and adopted Ethiopian sisters Metsuwat (4) and Abebu (3). Would the Barnetts have achieved such a blended clan absent the early experiences of Emily’s cancer? Probably not. But yes, that’s perhaps another reason why they wanted to revisit this tumultuous early family chapter at this time. As Vonne now finally gets back to restarting her professional career, the couple wanted to take this moment to remember how they got here – or how the journey truly began.
What you are about to read in this series of eBooks are the original weekly updates as Tom wrote them – with
Vonne’s continuous inputs – across all of 1995 and into early 1996, a period encompassing the last 14 months of Emily’s treatment protocol. Those 45 updates constitute Chapters 3 through 9 in the series: Chapter 3, which concludes with the birth of our second child, in included in this volume; Chapters 4 and 5, which cover the difficult summer of 1995, make up Volume II; Chapters 6 and 7, which chronicle the family's final push on the chemotherapy, fill out Volume III; and Chapters 8 and 9, which encompass the post-treatment diagnostics – and Make a Wish trip to Disney World, constitute Volume IV.
The first two chapters presented in this volume are actually recreations of the events surrounding the initial
diagnoses (Chapter 1) and the beginning of in-hospital treatment (Chapter 2) in July of 1994. Tom put these
diary-like remembrances together in June of 1995 to mark the one-year anniversary of the diagnosis, and they are based on the voluminous medical records. Various stories concerning the period between those initial treatments and the beginning of the updates in January 1995 appear across most of the 45 updates.
Tom and Vonne haven’t made an effort to “improve” the updates from today’s perspective, feeling it was important to leave them in their raw, written-in-the-heat-of-battle state. Yes, they now claim to be wiser on a host of subjects, but a lot of that wisdom stems directly from these experiences, so they felt it made most sense to share them with you, the reader, in this unaltered format.
Once all of the updates are published as eBooks, Tom, Vonne will publish a fifth retrospective volume co-written with their daughter Emily. It explores our memories of those tumultuous events and how they've continued to shape their collective and individual lives ever since. The volume also includes commentary on the updates themselves, and provides general advice to parents facing similar crises in their family life.
If this series of eBooks helps you better understand an analogous past experience or ongoing crisis in your life, then Tom, Vonne and Emily have accomplished what they set out to do by sharing their intense story.
The Emily Updates (Vol. 1): One Year in the Life of the Girl Who Lived
Seventeen years ago, when Vonne was 33 and Tom was 32, they were suddenly confronted with every parent’s worst medical “bolt from the blue”: their only child, 30-month-old Emily, was diagnosed with an advanced – meaning metastasized – pediatric cancer. At the time, Tom worked for a defense think tank in the Washington, DC area and Vonne was a largely stay-at-home mom prepping for a return to her earlier professional career.
What followed was the defining crisis of their now 25-year marriage: an intense 20-month battle to keep their first-born alive. About six months into the struggle, Tom started writing a weekly update on Emily’s progress (or lack thereof) for interested parties. Vonne contributed to this blog-like diary, and it was sent out by email, fax and regular mail to over one hundred relatives and friends. The couple started this diary because they tired of having to rehash all the details in phonecalls, but over time they came to view it as something more important – a real-time memoir that would someday prove crucial to Emily’s understanding of how she became whom Tom and Vonne hoped she would become.
Several things came together in the last couple of years to convince Tom and Vonne that now was the time to finally publish this amazing diary. First – and most obviously – has been the meteoric rise of eBooks themselves. After all, the Emily Updates basically constituted a blog before there were blogs. Second was Emily’s own matriculation into college, where she now majors in East Asian studies and English. Having made it to adulthood, Tom and Vonne felt the time was right for their family – and Emily herself – to share this story with the world.
The family now hails from the Indianapolis area, and besides 19-year-old Emily – the girl who lived, it boasts five additional children: sons Kevin (16) and Jerome (11), an adopted Chinese daughter Vonne Mei (7), and adopted Ethiopian sisters Metsuwat (4) and Abebu (3). Would the Barnetts have achieved such a blended clan absent the early experiences of Emily’s cancer? Probably not. But yes, that’s perhaps another reason why they wanted to revisit this tumultuous early family chapter at this time. As Vonne now finally gets back to restarting her professional career, the couple wanted to take this moment to remember how they got here – or how the journey truly began.
What you are about to read in this series of eBooks are the original weekly updates as Tom wrote them – with
Vonne’s continuous inputs – across all of 1995 and into early 1996, a period encompassing the last 14 months of Emily’s treatment protocol. Those 45 updates constitute Chapters 3 through 9 in the series: Chapter 3, which concludes with the birth of our second child, in included in this volume; Chapters 4 and 5, which cover the difficult summer of 1995, make up Volume II; Chapters 6 and 7, which chronicle the family's final push on the chemotherapy, fill out Volume III; and Chapters 8 and 9, which encompass the post-treatment diagnostics – and Make a Wish trip to Disney World, constitute Volume IV.
The first two chapters presented in this volume are actually recreations of the events surrounding the initial
diagnoses (Chapter 1) and the beginning of in-hospital treatment (Chapter 2) in July of 1994. Tom put these
diary-like remembrances together in June of 1995 to mark the one-year anniversary of the diagnosis, and they are based on the voluminous medical records. Various stories concerning the period between those initial treatments and the beginning of the updates in January 1995 appear across most of the 45 updates.
Tom and Vonne haven’t made an effort to “improve” the updates from today’s perspective, feeling it was important to leave them in their raw, written-in-the-heat-of-battle state. Yes, they now claim to be wiser on a host of subjects, but a lot of that wisdom stems directly from these experiences, so they felt it made most sense to share them with you, the reader, in this unaltered format.
Once all of the updates are published as eBooks, Tom, Vonne will publish a fifth retrospective volume co-written with their daughter Emily. It explores our memories of those tumultuous events and how they've continued to shape their collective and individual lives ever since. The volume also includes commentary on the updates themselves, and provides general advice to parents facing similar crises in their family life.
If this series of eBooks helps you better understand an analogous past experience or ongoing crisis in your life, then Tom, Vonne and Emily have accomplished what they set out to do by sharing their intense story.
What followed was the defining crisis of their now 25-year marriage: an intense 20-month battle to keep their first-born alive. About six months into the struggle, Tom started writing a weekly update on Emily’s progress (or lack thereof) for interested parties. Vonne contributed to this blog-like diary, and it was sent out by email, fax and regular mail to over one hundred relatives and friends. The couple started this diary because they tired of having to rehash all the details in phonecalls, but over time they came to view it as something more important – a real-time memoir that would someday prove crucial to Emily’s understanding of how she became whom Tom and Vonne hoped she would become.
Several things came together in the last couple of years to convince Tom and Vonne that now was the time to finally publish this amazing diary. First – and most obviously – has been the meteoric rise of eBooks themselves. After all, the Emily Updates basically constituted a blog before there were blogs. Second was Emily’s own matriculation into college, where she now majors in East Asian studies and English. Having made it to adulthood, Tom and Vonne felt the time was right for their family – and Emily herself – to share this story with the world.
The family now hails from the Indianapolis area, and besides 19-year-old Emily – the girl who lived, it boasts five additional children: sons Kevin (16) and Jerome (11), an adopted Chinese daughter Vonne Mei (7), and adopted Ethiopian sisters Metsuwat (4) and Abebu (3). Would the Barnetts have achieved such a blended clan absent the early experiences of Emily’s cancer? Probably not. But yes, that’s perhaps another reason why they wanted to revisit this tumultuous early family chapter at this time. As Vonne now finally gets back to restarting her professional career, the couple wanted to take this moment to remember how they got here – or how the journey truly began.
What you are about to read in this series of eBooks are the original weekly updates as Tom wrote them – with
Vonne’s continuous inputs – across all of 1995 and into early 1996, a period encompassing the last 14 months of Emily’s treatment protocol. Those 45 updates constitute Chapters 3 through 9 in the series: Chapter 3, which concludes with the birth of our second child, in included in this volume; Chapters 4 and 5, which cover the difficult summer of 1995, make up Volume II; Chapters 6 and 7, which chronicle the family's final push on the chemotherapy, fill out Volume III; and Chapters 8 and 9, which encompass the post-treatment diagnostics – and Make a Wish trip to Disney World, constitute Volume IV.
The first two chapters presented in this volume are actually recreations of the events surrounding the initial
diagnoses (Chapter 1) and the beginning of in-hospital treatment (Chapter 2) in July of 1994. Tom put these
diary-like remembrances together in June of 1995 to mark the one-year anniversary of the diagnosis, and they are based on the voluminous medical records. Various stories concerning the period between those initial treatments and the beginning of the updates in January 1995 appear across most of the 45 updates.
Tom and Vonne haven’t made an effort to “improve” the updates from today’s perspective, feeling it was important to leave them in their raw, written-in-the-heat-of-battle state. Yes, they now claim to be wiser on a host of subjects, but a lot of that wisdom stems directly from these experiences, so they felt it made most sense to share them with you, the reader, in this unaltered format.
Once all of the updates are published as eBooks, Tom, Vonne will publish a fifth retrospective volume co-written with their daughter Emily. It explores our memories of those tumultuous events and how they've continued to shape their collective and individual lives ever since. The volume also includes commentary on the updates themselves, and provides general advice to parents facing similar crises in their family life.
If this series of eBooks helps you better understand an analogous past experience or ongoing crisis in your life, then Tom, Vonne and Emily have accomplished what they set out to do by sharing their intense story.
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The Emily Updates (Vol. 1): One Year in the Life of the Girl Who Lived
The Emily Updates (Vol. 1): One Year in the Life of the Girl Who Lived
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Product Details
| BN ID: | 2940013384651 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Barnett Consulting LLC |
| Publication date: | 09/17/2011 |
| Series: | The Emily Updates, Vols. 1-5 , #1 |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| File size: | 242 KB |
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