You've got mail. (via GoFundMe)
Start your saturday off crying why don't you? Danny Nickerson is a 5-year-old kid from Foxboro, MA who, last October, was diagnosed with DIPG (Diffuse Intrinsic Pontine Glioma), an inoperable brain tumor located in the brain stem. His birthday's coming up on July 25th, so his Mom asked her community to help give her son the best birthday ever by sending him lots of birthday cards.
But the Internet has a way of expanding the definition of "community."
The article was posted on North Attleboro, MA's The Sun Chronicle website early Thursday morning. Other sites like ABC News started to pick it up. Then late last night, someone posted a photo of the original article to reddit with the header, "Saw this today around town, a little boy with a brain tumor only wants one thing for his birthday: letters. It takes $0.50 and ten minutes, but I bet it would mean the world to this kid."
(Via reddit)
Danny's mom better not have been kidding when she told the Sun Chronicle that her son "loves going to the mailbox and finding mail with his name on it," because that's about to become his full-time job.
The reddit post got upvoted several thousand times and it's now near the top of the front page. There are over a thousand comments on the post from reddit users from around the world, not just sharing their thoughts and prayers for Danny, but they're actually coordinating with each other what gifts they want to send to him. Someone even set up a public Google Docs spreadsheet for the thousands of strangers to keep track of each other's gift-gving so they don't overlap.
Once word got out via that ABC News article that Danny wishes lego made Super Mario toys, redditors seized on it and tried to find someone who could put something together for him.
The last time this kind of thing happened was the pizza incident, where the family of a little girl battling cancer taped up the words "SEND PIZZA" on their hospital room window as a lark to amuse their daughter. The pic made it to reddit, and before long the entire floor of the hospital was flooded with pizzas being shared by the children and the staff. Eventually the hospital had to publicly ask that the pizza deliveries stop.
Considering that a birthday card is way cheaper than pizza, Danny's PO box is about to be so flooded with mail that he could single-handedly pull the US postal service back into the black from all the postage sales.
His birthday's July 25th. Address: Danny Nickerson, P.O. Box 212, Foxboro, MA 02035.
(by Bob Powers)