We were lucky to catch up with Sandra Andrade recently and have shared our conversation below.

Hi Sandra, thanks for joining us today. Is there a heartwarming story from your career that you look back on?

Through the tragedy of navigating a 2 1/2 year journey of childhood cancer (neuroblastoma) our family connected with other childhood cancer families to raise money to find a cure. Since 2014 our family and several other families and friends have joined together to honor our children and raise money for childhood cancer research. Had we not go through our journey we never would have met so many amazing families and professionals. We have tried yo create something healthy and beautiful out of the most painful time in our lives.

Sandra, before we move on to more of these sorts of questions, can you take some time to bring our readers up to speed on you and what you do?

In 2011 my daughter, Sophia, was diagnosed with stage 4 cancer at the age of 2 years and 3 months. She was misdiagnosed for about 1 month before we were sent to our local pediatric oncologist and later that day Children’s Hospital Los Angeles. She was treated for 2 1/2 years at CHLA for high risk stage 4 neuroblastoma which is a solid tumor most often diagnosed in children between the ages of two years and five years of age. Sophia received multiple rounds of chemotherapy, stem cell harvest, resection of the tumor, high dose chemotherapy, stem cell transplant, radiation, and immunotherapy before having no evidence of disease. Unfortunately she was off treatment for a very short amount of time before relapsing and our fight to save her life began again. At the age of 4 1/2 years old we lost Sophia to cancer.
In our grief of losing our only child we began raising money to support CHLA in finding a cure. We do not want other families to have to go through the pain of losing their child to childhood cancer. We have many fundraisers every year from raffles at blood drives (Collecting much needed blood donations and funding for research), triathlon fundraisers , taco dinner fundraisers, and bake sales, To date our group of families, Sophia’s Buddies, have raised over $500,000.00 for childhood cancer research at Children’s Hospital Los Angeles. We hope to help the hospital find less toxic treatments that cures all childhood cancers.

Let’s talk about resilience next – do you have a story you can share with us?

Losing our child to cancer helps fuel us to fight for families currently in the fight against cancer and those to be diagnosed in the future.

We’d love to hear a story of resilience from your journey.

Since our experience in cancer treatment we meet with newly diagnosed families and help connect them with support systems of families currently in the fight along with them and supports within the hospital to help them navigate this long journey.

Contact Info:

• Website: https://Www.sophiasbuddies.com
• Instagram: Sophias Buddies