Apomination

Hello Friend,

I joined the ranks of the brain injured in November 2024. My day job is in the fundraising team in Amnesty International Ireland. I don’t think the two are connected but I am open to the conversation.

My Story:

I was diagnosed with a Central Nervous System (CNS) Lymphoma in November 2024. A very rare cancer (7.5% of 1% of 100% of cancers diagnosed) and mine (on the cerebellum) is not even the most popular flavour. Several physical symptoms of brain injury emerged over November (slurring speech, difficultly forming sentences and bladder issues) the most extreme was balance, which is what first brought me in to A&E and which got much worse over November to the point that I was pushed in a wheelchair onto the oncology ward in the first days of December.

Five cycles of chemotherapy later I walked off the oncology ward without even a crutch. On the 2^nd of April I was taking my wife away for a few days in Athens and we were sitting at the gate and our flight had been called. My wife glanced over at my passport and pointed out it was my old one. So I had to leave the airport get my newer passport and book an expensive later flight. Now, I had noticed that I had picked up the wrong passport a couple of days before but I could not initiate the action to grab the other passport out of the drawer. There was something going on inside my head.

I spoke with a brain injury charity and they said it was probably an executive management issue. I work in fundraising for a different charity and had a quick look around their website and noticed they do lots of fundraising around hats. I thought this was quite a clever idea. I then started thinking along these lines and thought it would be a small but interesting fundraiser to sell a distinctive hat. Then the next year sell a different but still distinctive hat but I struggled how to tie the two together. Somewhere in the deep recesses of my brain I remembered pompoms and that they were used since Viking times to minimise bumps to the head for sailors and I thought that really played into the hat concept. So you could attach a pompom this year and attach the pompom to the hat for the next year. Again I thought it was a clever idea.

The mental leap then was that I didn’t need the hats and the pompom could be turned into a brooch and sold for the benefit of a charity. Similar to the way daffodils brooches are sold on Daffodil Day which is a major fundraiser (€6m/year) for the Irish Cancer Society. So I have been exploring how to make this happen.

I want to put together a turnkey fundraising collection kit consisting of the pompoms, buckets, stickers, hats, XL pompoms etc. to allow a local charity to organise a big or small collection for their benefit. You have the local knowledge and are in a much better position to organise collections locally than I am. My goal is to get the cost of this well within a half hour of collecting with just one bucket.

I see this both as a great fundraiser and also a means of starting the discussion around brain injury in the media. Two things that I have observed are lacking in the community.

The plan is to run this over a weekend in late September which is around the start of the seasons for many high contact sports. This will be what is known as a “shakedown cruise” where we try to break stuff so that it’s fixed for the next year.

Please stick an email address that will be read on this page www.apomination.com where I have put down much more detail than I could ever include in one letter.

Please pass on this message to everyone in your area involved both geographically and vocationally. Thanks for reading this and I look forward to working with you.