daughter - News - The Coastal Star2024-03-28T09:04:24Zhttps://thecoastalstar.com/profiles/blogs/feed/tag/daughterTots & Teens: St. John Paul II student raises funds to honor dad, fight cancerhttps://thecoastalstar.com/profiles/blogs/tots-teens-st-john-paul-ii-student-raises-funds-to-honor-dad-figh2019-02-26T23:38:03.000Z2019-02-26T23:38:03.000ZThe Coastal Starhttps://thecoastalstar.com/members/TheCoastalStar<div><p style="text-align:center;"><em><a href="{{#staticFileLink}}7960849267,original{{/staticFileLink}}" target="_blank"><img src="{{#staticFileLink}}7960849267,original{{/staticFileLink}}" class="align-center" alt="7960849267?profile=original" /></a></em><em>Madison Nolan hopes to raise $50,000 by March 8 for the Leukemia & Lymphoma Society in honor of her father, Ed Nolan, who died in April after battling lymphoma. On March 5 she wants fellow students to donate $3 each and wear lime green, the LLS color. <strong>Photo provided<br /></strong></em></p>
<p><strong>By Janis Fontaine</strong></p>
<p>Just 17 years old, Madison Nolan of Delray Beach is dealing with a tremendous loss by doing something positive. <br /> Last April 5, Madison lost her father, Ed Nolan, to non-Hodgkin lymphoma.</p>
<p>NHL is the most common form of blood cancer — sometimes called liquid cancer — with more than 70,000 cases diagnosed each year in the United States. The disease forms in the bloodstream or lymph system, which carries disease-fighting white blood cells throughout the body.</p>
<p>Madison, a senior at Saint John Paul II Academy in Boca Raton, has been nominated to be one of the Leukemia & Lymphoma Society’s students of the year. The title is awarded to the candidate in each community who raises the most in donations during a seven-week competition, which this year ends March 8. Go to Tinyurl.com/MadisonLLS to donate.</p>
<p>Student of the Year is a philanthropic leadership development program for exemplary high school students. Participants build professional skills such as entrepreneurship, marketing and project management while raising money to fight liquid cancers. <br /> Saint John Paul II Academy requires students to wear school uniforms. The chance to wear jeans and non-school colors is enticing, so charity-driven “dress-down days” are effective fundraisers. But for Madison, her March 5 event will also be a way to honor her father.</p>
<p>“I want everyone to see his smiling face,” Madison said. “He was one of the good guys.”</p>
<p>Madison asks participants to make $3 donations and to wear lime green shirts and jeans to school. Lime green is the color of the Leukemia & Lymphoma Society. Her goal is to raise $50,000 by March 8, but she admits that while the money is important, what she really wants is to see her school dressed in lime green as a tribute to the man who always had a smile and a kind word.<br /> “It’s only been 10 months,” Madison said, “so it’s going to be hard, but I’m super-excited to be making a memory for him.”<br /> Madison says her best friends have really stepped up for her. “It’s easy to talk about him. I want to talk about him, and they understand that.”</p>
<p>Madison was about 5 years old when her father was diagnosed in 2006. “He had a PET scan and it lit up like a Christmas tree,” Madison said.</p>
<p>He was treated with chemotherapy, and Madison remembers when she visited him at treatment, he was the guy who was walking around, laughing and joking and cheering everyone else up. “Nothing ever affected him.”</p>
<p>Ed Nolan was doing well as 2017 drew to a close. He’d made so much progress that doctors thought he was in remission, and the family had a party to celebrate his being cancer-free. In December, he needed a little minor surgery and he didn’t recover from anesthesia well.</p>
<p>Things got worse. The cancer had metastasized to his brain, an unexpected and dire development. “We didn’t think the cancer could do that,” Madison said. “He’d always pulled through before.”</p>
<p>But at the beginning of April, Madison was taking a history test when someone called her to the front office. The staff told her to bring her books. A woman in the office was in tears. “She told me things were bad,” Madison said. Her mom’s sister had flown in from Alaska to help, and she took Madison to the hospital.</p>
<p>It’s still hard for Madison to believe her father is gone. She misses his sarcasm and his jokes, and riding in his Jeep down to the beach. Her father was a 36-year employee of FPL and “he loved his job and he had a group of guys he loved, his FPL guys,” Madison said.</p>
<p>Her mother, Kathleen Nolan, is supportive and proud of her daughter’s efforts to honor her father.</p>
<p>Madison also finds comfort with her dog, Bella, a black Lab mix she and her dad rescued. “She sleeps under the covers,” she said.</p>
<p>Madison wants to go to college, but isn’t quite ready to leave home yet. She wants to become a physician’s assistant.</p>
<p>“I’ve always loved anything medical,” she said. “I’m interested in holistic medicine and how we can treat people using herbs and supplements or acupuncture, as alternatives or in addition to chemo drugs.”</p>
<p>The LLS says that its students of the year have an important responsibility: “We call on those strong enough to fight for others. We need standouts who can stand up to cancer.”</p></div>Tots & Teens: Student’s speech uses father’s survival at sea as life lessonhttps://thecoastalstar.com/profiles/blogs/tots-teens-student-s-speech-uses-father-s-survival-at-sea-as-life2018-02-28T14:52:29.000Z2018-02-28T14:52:29.000ZThe Coastal Starhttps://thecoastalstar.com/members/TheCoastalStar<div><p style="text-align:center;"><a href="{{#staticFileLink}}7960774263,original{{/staticFileLink}}"><img src="{{#staticFileLink}}7960774263,original{{/staticFileLink}}" class="align-center" width="600" alt="7960774263?profile=original" /></a><em>Gulf Stream School eighth-grader Dakota Konrad hugs her father, Rob, a former Miami Dolphin, after giving a speech about how he survived a boating accident. <strong>Jerry Lower/The Coastal Star</strong></em></p>
<p><strong>By Willie Howard</strong></p>
<p>Dakota Konrad, an eighth-grade student at Gulf Stream School, said her father —former Miami Dolphins fullback Rob Konrad — has always been a determined person.<br /> In her eighth-grade speech, delivered with accompanying photos in a school chapel filled with her classmates and teachers, Dakota also said her father is tough and tenacious. <br /> He recovered from knee injuries and trained hard enough to become a pro football player. Konrad was drafted by the Dolphins in 1999 and played fullback for them until 2004. <br /> In her speech, titled “Just Keep Swimming,” Dakota said her father has always taught her and her sister never to give up if they want to achieve something.<br /> Circumstances forced Konrad to prove just how determined he was on Jan. 7, 2015 — the day he decided to do some fishing by himself while running his 31-foot Grady-White boat along the coast of Palm Beach County for a routine trip to the shop. <br /> The ocean was rough that day. He had the boat steering on autopilot when a fish hit and Konrad moved to the stern to fight the fish. <br /> As he was reeling the fish in, a wave rocked the boat and Konrad fell overboard, still holding the rod with the fish attached. <br /> He was about 9 miles off the coast and not wearing a life jacket. His boat kept going, headed east on autopilot.<br /> Konrad, then 38, tried to chase the boat at first, then decided to swim west toward land. With sea surface temperatures in the low 70s, ocean water was sapping his body heat and energy.<br /> “My dad started swimming toward the setting sun,” said Dakota, dressed in a No. 44 football jersey, the number her father wore for the Dolphins. “Since my dad kept swimming, each stroke was heating up his body.”<br /> At home, nobody suspected anything was wrong until Konrad didn’t return that evening. The Coast Guard initiated a search. Dakota said she and her sister remember seeing their mother crying on the phone. <br /> Meanwhile, Konrad was swimming in the dark. Jellyfish stung him. A shark circled him. He saw lights from a Coast Guard helicopter, but they didn’t see him in the waves, Dakota said.<br /> Konrad just kept swimming, alternating between breaststroke and backstroke, headed toward lights along the coast. <br /> Dressed only in his underwear, Konrad pulled himself onto the beach in Palm Beach and rang the doorbell at the nearest home he could find. It was 4:40 a.m. and he had been swimming for 16 hours, a feat so impressive that skeptics didn’t believe his story at first.<br />A security guard was patrolling the oceanfront home where Konrad finally came ashore. The guard saw Konrad approaching the house and called police. Police knew Konrad was missing because the Coast Guard had been searching for him. They wrapped him in a blanket and drove him to Good Samaritan Medical Center in West Palm Beach.<br /> His boat was found near Deadman’s Reef, a snorkeling spot near Freeport on Grand Bahama Island.<br /> Dakota said her father told them he focused on her and her younger sister, Brooke, who were 10 and 8 at the time, to give him the strength to reach land.<br /> “He told us we were the reasons he made it home,” Dakota said.<br /> Konrad’s ocean experience drove home a key message in his daughter’s speech: “You can absolutely do anything if you put your mind to it,” she said. “I will live by this motto for the rest of my life.”<br /> Dakota’s speech was immediately followed by hugs from her classmates, teachers and her parents.<br /> “Dakota’s speech resonated with every student, parent and teacher in the chapel that day,” said Mari Bianco, Dakota’s English teacher. “Students couldn’t imagine losing their parents. Parents couldn’t imagine not fighting to reunite with their children.” <br /> Konrad, who grew up fishing and boating off the coast of Massachusetts and lives in Boynton Beach, still takes his family boating, both in Florida and in Cape Cod during the summer. As a precaution, Konrad said, he wears an electronic kill switch that would shut off the boat’s engines if he were to fall out again.</p></div>