Marissa Cannady

Marissa's story....how do I begin.  My beautiful 30 year old, loving, kind, amazing, incredibly intelligent, humorous daughter of mine, my baby bear, suffered a severe hemorrhagic stroke this past Saturday.  She was taken on Flight for Life to Swedish Hospital.  This was by far the most terrifying, life changing day our family has ever gone through, hands down, no comparison to anything which has ever come before. So as I write this message to you all, happy tears are flowing because I feel so blessed to have my daughter to hold and tell her how much I love her. To let her know we will be by her side, every step of this very hard, surreal journey. I remind myself daily, no matter how scared, tired, sad or hard I feel this is at the end of the day, that all of those things are way worse for Marissa. She is such a fighter. Because of this, her unyielding determination to get better, she is working so hard to do what she knows she needs to do. We keep telling her when she overcomes this, she will be an even better, more compassionate, empathetic speech pathologist, because she will have been through everything she is telling her patients to do. She will have experienced it firsthand.  Our family wants to thank each and everyone of you for the amazing amount of love and outpouring of support you are giving her and us. It is making our journey easier knowing you are there. We couldn't go though this without you!