Long before there was a Batkid, there was The Leukemia Slayer, the alter ego of 12-year-old Jacob Goeders from Mountain View, who has been fighting the disease since December 2010. Besides using his super powers to give nasty cancer cells the one-two punch, the Slayer leads the way each holiday season to raise money to buy presents for other kids on the oncology ward at Lucille Packard Children’s Hospital.
“I wanted to make other kids feel good, and I wanted to do something,” Jacob told me during last year’s fundraiser he dubbed The Santa Slayer Project. “I felt good because I was helping other kids who were stuck in the hospital like I was.”
In 2010, Jacob nearly spent Christmas in the hospital undergoing treatment, and it was that memory one year later that spurred him to start the annual project. His family had started The Leukemia Slayer Facebook Page earlier in 2011 (Jacob picked out the alter ego name for himself), and by the fall he had already had amassed about 2,000 followers. He asked them to each send in $1 so he could by presents, and amazingly he did raise about $2,000. [Read more…]
