POPSUGAR: Tell me a bit about how this started. What were some of the thoughts that went through your head when you received this prognosis, and how did it lead to your napkin notes?
Garth Callaghan: I was writing notes to my daughter, Emma, well before my first diagnosis. But back then it wasn't a thing, it was just me writing a note to her and putting it in her lunch bag every day. It was a way for me to provide some encouragement on a daily basis and a way for her to connect with me while she was away at school. It was just something we did to kind of to be special in our family.
Then when Emma was in sixth grade, I was diagnosed with cancer for my first time. I won't share the exact thoughts that went through my head, because they're definitely not appropriate for a general audience, but I freaked out. I had no history of cancer in my family, I wasn't sure what to do, I had no idea what kidney cancer was about, I hadn't really heard of kidney cancer before.
Fortunately, I had a great medical team and we corrected that with surgery and they kind of patched me up and said, "You don't have cancer, move along, have a great life." A few months after that diagnosis, I saw that my daughter had been saving the napkin notes I had been writing and she had been putting them into a composition book. I looked and I saw line after line after line of my notes where she has ripped the words away from the napkin. I looked at it and I thought, "This is something that we should share. We should try to figure out a way to share this with other parents. Maybe some moms and dads could gain some inspiration and write notes to their own kids." So, I asked her if it was OK if we shared it and we started sharing it on social media. What I didn't anticipate is that a few months after that, I would be diagnosed with cancer again — a completely different and unrelated cancer. And then again a year after that, and a few months after that. So in the past three years, I’ve been diagnosed with cancer four times.
