Mother shares how St. Jude helped her son with leukemia survive

You did it, you helped sell out the St. Jude Dream Home Giveaway, that is 13,500 people who came forward and said, here's my $100 and now you helped build $1.3 million to help families at St. Jude. Here's the team I've been with, my goodness. I've learned to love each and every one of these, whether they're from Fox 26 or from St. Jude. I feel like they're family because we have been in this. We started with them last year. Now here we are two months in and you did it. I went to Memphis with my fabulous photographer, Ray, who's on the other side of this camera today. And we left our hearts on that campus at St. Jude. It touched me so much. I met up with a mom there named Michelle. She and I had so much in common. And first of all, our children were diagnosed with leukemia at the age of six. She's going to share her story and why what you've done, Houston, means so very much to not only her family, but every single patient and family that's either been treated at St. Jude or is being treated there right now. There are childhood memories a mother never forgets. For Michelle, one of them is the night her six-year-old son, Tyler, crawled into her bedroom crying in pain. He could no longer put any weight on his arms and legs. And he just kept screaming. For months, she'd known something was wrong, but kept getting misdiagnosed. Finally, an emergency room visit brought the answer she'd been desperately searching for. Acute lymphoblastic leukemia. Her little boy had cancer. The little boy who once loved climbing and playing sports was suddenly fighting for his life. But Michelle knew about St. Jude's and she had supported it most of her life. She just never dreamed she would need their help for her own son. You know, I thought the toughest cases in the world come here. And at St. Jude, doctors did everything they could to save Tyler's life while his family got to focus on helping him get well. Then came something his mother will never forget. Not during one of his appointments or in a hospital room, but at the finish line of a marathon. And he turned, there's one stretch where they turned that last corner and in my head, I saw this little kid, this little bald boy who was crawling and screaming in pain. And I looked at this young man. Turn that corner, and it was like a full circle moment, and I lost it. The same boy who couldn't walk that terrible night was now running a marathon, and his mother was there to see every step. You know, they promised me they would help him survive, but they also said we're going to help him thrive. And I knew right then, I was like, this kid is going to do amazing things in life. And it's all because of St. Jude. It's a kind of moment the visionary of the institution dreamed about. Everyone rubs his nose here for good luck. He believed saving children shouldn't depend on how much money or what type of insurance their families had. The founder of St. Jude, Danny Thomas had a huge mission to let everybody know about what he wanted to do here at St. Jude. This represents the thousands of kiddos he wanted to help save from cancer. He would say that, I just wish a million people would give a dollar. That might even be better than one person giving a million because more people would know about it. And now, you can buy a raffle for the Dream Home Giveaway and keep up that mission. Today, that mission stretches all the way from Memphis to Houston, one $100 ticket at a time. For families like Michelle's, those tickets mean more than most of us will ever know. That ticket that you're buying is contributing to my child living. You are helping my child survive and thrive. Michelle, the proof of what St. Jude can do isn't found in a hospital. It's in the young man she gets to cheer for today and in the future he now gets to have. Yes, it's a dream home ticket, but it's hope for families like ours. Today, one lucky person will win a beautiful home. But for children like Tyler, the greatest prize was never a house. It was a chance to grow up. And Houston, you are going to help so many patients just like Tyler because you sold out H-Town. You bought every single ticket available, which is incredible. I'm back here in the home in Richmond now, right now live, coloring and thinking about hope. You know what they do at St. Jude? They have all kinds of arts and crafts programs to make sure that the child can be a kid. It's so amazing what they are able to do here to give them hope. It's such a beautiful Beautiful partnership that mom Michelle and I told you our kids were treated at six now they're both 19. They're both in college. They both ran a marathon last year and that is because of unbelievable collaborations of hospitals. St. Jude helps our hospitals and gives them their research every single day in Houston. It's remarkable to see how they all work together to try to cure our kiddos. So guess what? At every half hour for the rest of our morning, we are going to be drawing maybe your name. If you entered early and you are eligible for some of those prizes, we will be drawing them right here in Richmond. I've got that little hopper, so to speak, over here. We're going to fill it up with names. And then at 5 o'clock, we'll have a little wardrobe change, get a little fancy smancy, and pull your name to find out who's moving to Richmond. Back to you guys in the studio. It's going to be so exciting because you know what, even if they don't win the home, those prizes, oh man. Amazing. They were really cool. And Melissa, you'll have an official accountant with you doing the drawing? Yes, you're going to meet Sam in just a little while. He'll tell us all the rules. It's how it has to be done. We'll go through his rules of how they safely do it to make sure everybody knows this is so absolutely legitimate. All right. Awesome. Thanks for this amazing story too, Melissa.