Alexandra "Alex" Munoz knows where she will be today.
After attending mass in the morning, it's tradition for her family to head over to her grandmother's house, just two blocks away from their home in Cypress.
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How to reach them
To attract future donors for the Teddy Bear Donation Drive, the Munoz family is working with Brenda Trujillo, senior account executive with Dawson & Dawson, an executive search firm in mission Viejo.
The family can be contacted at 714-373-4542 for more information. Trujillo can be reached at 949-421-3966 or 714-600-1660.
But Alex knows that a lot of kids can't celebrate Christmas at home with family. They're in the hospital being treated for cancer.
To bring some Christmas cheer, she started the Teddy Bear Donation Drive.
A few days before Christmas, Alex, her mom and younger brother Anthony visited local hospitals to drop off armfuls of joy ? stuffed animals donated by friends, family, neighbors, students and teachers at Cypress High, and people at workplaces.
Why stuffed animals?
"It's like giving a hug to someone all the time," said Alex, a freshman and pre-med student at UCLA who wants to be a pediatrician.
She knows just how much hugs can mean to a child who is scared and missing home.
Last year, at 17, Alex was diagnosed with ovarian cancer, a rare disease for someone so young.
She had surgery in May 2010 to remove a tumor the size of a cantaloupe and then subsequent rounds of chemotherapy that left her exhausted, nauseous and bald. Alex found comfort in a chocolate-colored stuffed animal puppy that was a gift from her TeamOC gymnastics club coaches.
She'd fall asleep holding it, a reminder of all the people who loved her.
So last Christmas she distributed more than 100 stuffed animals to childhood cancer patients at Kaiser medical centers and at Miller Children's Hospital in Long Beach, where the mother of one of Alex's best friends is a doctor ? and a cancer survivor.
Alex and her mom recall one older teen, a big guy sporting tattoos and earlobe plugs. They weren't sure he'd want a stuffed animal, but when Sylvia asked him, he gave a quick nod. Later, they saw him walking the hall in his gown, clutching his white teddy bear.
"That made me think stuffed animals really are for everyone," Alex said.
Alex and her two elves were back at Miller on Thursday with two wagons filled with stuffed animals. They stopped in playrooms, met children in the hallways and paid bedside visits to kids too sick to leave their rooms.
Ashley Perez, 12, of Garden Grove looked up from a paper snowman she was making to choose a fluffy brown bear. Ashley, who has leukemia, was hospitalized a week ago because she felt too sick to eat. Seeing Ashley's wisps of hair, Alex shared hopeful words.
"It'll come back," she told the girl. "I promise you."
A CHILD SHOWS THE WAY
Early last year, before her diagnosis, Alex had gone a few weeks feeling a "bump" in her abdomen. A competitive gymnast since the age of 9, Alex hid the growth from her parents.
"I thought I was just getting chunky," she said.
Then it got to where she couldn't stretch in gymnastics. Finally, she called her parents from practice to say she wasn't feeling well. On the ride to urgent care, her worry surged. "I just started rambling and crying."
The entire summer before her senior year of high school was spent undergoing four rounds of chemotherapy ? one every three weeks, and a hospital stay of four days each time. She lost about 15 pounds, most of it muscle. She would beg her mom to make the constant "beep, beep" of the chemo pump go away. That stuffed puppy dog stayed by her side.
"My daughter's experience with ovarian cancer taught me just how far a little bit of comfort goes for a child who must endure the indignities of chemotherapy," Sylvia Munoz said.
Alex was older than the other pediatric cancer patients at Kaiser Permanente Hospital in Anaheim Hills, but she took her cue on being brave from a 2-year-old named Omar. Alex saw him that first day she went for chemotherapy.
Sylvia Munoz says her nervous daughter had the same look on her face that she gets right before competing in gymnastics, "that blank look, like, 'Ooh, here we go.'"
Omar was all business.
"He wasn't even nervous when the doctors pulled out his shunt to take his blood count," Alex said. "It let me know that if a little kid could do it, I could do it too."
A NEW TRADITION
Her recovery has gone well. She returned to school for the start of her senior year and got back to gymnastics that October. Her dark, wavy hair ? once halfway down her back ? slowly grew in.
But as good as things were going for Alex, she kept thinking about young cancer patients. She wanted to do something to help make them feel better, something to make it easier to be hospitalized at Christmas.
"I thought how much the dog helped me," she said of that puppy, the only stuffed animal she took along to her dorm at UCLA.
With her mother's organizing skills ? Sylvia Munoz works in human resources ? they launched the Teddy Bear Drive.
This year they collected about 160 stuffed animals and added Children's Hospital of Orange County to their stops. Next year, they hope to attract corporate donors to help expand the drive.
Their visit on Thursday to the Hematology and Oncology Unit at Miller Children's Hospital touched the heart of Juliet Pulido of Downey, whose daughter Marie, 6, has been hospitalized since June. Marie has aplastic anemia, a condition that prevents her bone marrow from producing enough new blood cells.
Marie picked out a big brown plush teddy bear, while her brother, Aaden, 3, chose a creature that could play a part in "Monsters Inc."
"It's kind of sad for her to be here for Christmas," Juliet Pulido said of her daughter. "So this is awesome."
Contact the writer: twalker@ocregister.com or 714-796-7793
Source: http://www.ocregister.com/articles/alex-332882-stuffed-year.html
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