By Julie Hutchison | President, Co-Founder and Chelsea's Mother
Thank you for your support of our mission to grant comfort and hope to those living with seizure disorders/epilepsy. With the generous support of you and others, we have just paid our 45th seizure-response dog grant. In addition, we have provided 112 life-saving monitors for those in need. We have a lot of work to do as epilepsy affects over 3 million Americans of all ages - more than multiple sclerosis, cerebral palsy, muscular dystrophy and Parkinson's disease, combined. Almost 500 new cases of epilepsy are diagnosed every day and up to 50,000 American's die from seizures and seizure-related causes every year in the United States.
On Friday, April 26, 2013, Chelsea's Caribbean Beach Party Gala will be hosted by the Chelsea Hutchison Foundation at The Island Event Center in Denver, Colorado. This is the Foundation's 4th annual gala and promises to be a fun-filled evening with Caribbean dinner buffet, live music, dancing, entertainment and auctions - all on a sand-floor event center. Live music will be performed by Tunisia Band, who performed at both political conventions in 2012. It is a real honor for us to welcome them. Special guests include Shanna Wilkinson and her amazing seizure alert/response dog, Holly. Holly received the National Hero Dog Award in the Service Dog Category in 2012. Dan Mitchell of 99.5 The Mountain is the evening's emcee.
The Chelsea Hutchison Foundation is a Colorado non-profit corporation formed to help individuals, particularly children and young adults, who have epilepsy. The main focus is to raise funds to provide grants for seizure-response dogs. These trained service dogs may be able to detect an oncoming seizure and provide warnings and/or respond after the onset of a seizure. The Foundation also provides Emfit movement monitors and grants for SmartWatch monitors for those in need. Emfit monitors are the latest technology for monitoring an individual who, during sleep, may experience seizures which a caregiver or family should be alerted to. The SmartWatch is a patented, intelligent, motion detecting and alerting wristwatch. SmartWatch is a fully portable non-invasive device that continuously monitors movement, analyzes the information for abnormalities, issues alerts and securely records seizure events. To date, we have provided grants for 44 seizure-response and have provided over 100 monitors.
The Foundation is named for Chelsea, who died in her sleep during a seizure in April of 2009. SUDEP (Sudden Unexpected Death in Epilepsy) was the cause of her death. During the 6 years that Chelsea had seizures, no one ever told us a seizure could take her life, other than through an accidental fall or drowning. As a result of that omission, the Chelsea Hutchison Foundation informs those living with epilepsy of the risks and raises awareness of SUDEP so that no other families are blind-sided. For more information, please visit our website. www.ChelseaHutchisonFoundation.org or contact us directly at ChelseasLegacy@aol.com
Project reports on GlobalGiving are posted directly to globalgiving.org by Project Leaders as they are completed, generally every 3-4 months. To protect the integrity of these documents, GlobalGiving does not alter them; therefore you may find some language or formatting issues.
If you donate to this project or have donated to this project, you can receive an email when this project posts a report. You can also subscribe for reports without donating.
