Dream Home Giveaway tickets give St. Jude families hope

Welcome back to the St. Jude Dream Home Giveaway Day, I'm going to call it, because this whole day we're going to be celebrating every half hour this morning. We'll be giving away and drawing some of those names for all the different prizes. But a few months ago, my photographer Raymond and I, who's with me today, we traveled to Memphis to truly get a sense of what this is all about. And I tell you what, Memphis is certainly known for its music, but we found out that it goes way We're way beyond that. In this unbelievable town. Take a look. There are childhood memories a mother never forgets. For Michelle, one of them is a 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 there's one stretch where they turn 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 that 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.