Why I Started The Noellie Foundation™

Some stories begin in darkness before they find their light. When I was sixteen, I was diagnosed with a rare brain disease. I couldn't have known then that this diagnosis would shape the next decade of my life - or that it would eventually lead me here, to this foundation, to this mission that feels both deeply personal and somehow bigger than anything I could have imagined alone. 

For years, my procedures fell during Christmas. I don't know why the timing always worked out that way, but it did. I spent so many Decembers in hospital rooms, watching Santa Claus flicker across muted television screens while the rest of the world gathered around tables and trees and each other. During college, I had three-day procedures that stretched across the holiday season, 

and I remember lying there thinking about how strange it was - the world outside twinkling with lights and laughter and love, while inside these walls, time moved differently. Slower. Quieter. Lonelier.

Because that's the thing no one really tells you about being sick: the loneliness. Not just the physical isolation of hospital rooms and cancelled plans and days that blur together in a haze of fluorescent lights and beeping machines, but the deeper kind - the loneliness of feeling like the world is spinning forward while you're standing still. Of wondering if anyone remembers you're here. Of trying to hold onto yourself when everything familiar feels impossibly far away. 

But I was never completely alone. I always had my plushies with me - Muffin, my favorite since childhood, and my little Gap reindeer that jingles. Every single procedure, even at twenty-eight years old, I brought them with me. They weren't just toys, though I know that's what they looked like to anyone passing by. They were anchors. They were proof that I was still me, that there was still a version of myself who existed outside these walls, who had a childhood and memories and a life waiting on the other side of whatever this was. When I'd come out of anesthesia disoriented and scared, I could reach for them. I could hear the jingle of my reindeer and know where I was. I could hold Muffin and remember who I was. They were familiar when everything else felt foreign. They were mine when so much felt out of my control. 

This past year - my fourth year of graduate school at Notre Dame - I got sick again. This time, it was cancer. The details of that season are private, and I'm still processing much of it, still finding language for things that sometimes feel beyond words. But what I can tell you is this: in the middle of that darkness, somewhere between the fear and the fighting and the long nights of wondering what would come next, I felt a clarity I'd never experienced before. I knew I had to do something with this. I knew my story wasn't just mine to carry in silence - it was mine to transform, to give, to turn into something that might bring light into someone else's darkness. 

Christmas has always been my favorite time of year. Always. Maybe it's the magic of it - the lights in the darkness, the warmth in the cold, the way everything feels possible again. Or maybe it's something deeper - this belief I've carried my whole life that even in the coldest, darkest nights, light breaks through. Hope arrives. Miracles happen. Love finds a way.

And so this foundation was born. 

Noellie™ came to life this past Christmas, born out of love and dreamed into being with someone who believed in the magic of this mission as much as I did. The name means Christmas - a reminder that comfort and joy and hope can find us even in our hardest moments, that we can create light even when we're surrounded by darkness. It's a promise that no one has to face those moments alone, that being seen and remembered and loved matters more than we sometimes realize. 

The Christmas Courage Program is my way of giving what I needed most during those long hospital stays: tangible reminders that someone was thinking of me, that I mattered beyond my diagnosis, that even in the hardest days I could hold something soft and know I wasn't forgotten. Every child in the program receives a cuddly plushie companion and carefully chosen children's

books - small gifts that carry meaning far bigger than their size. Because I know what it's like to need something to hold onto when everything feels uncertain. I know what it's like to need a story that takes you somewhere else, even if just for a moment. I know what it's like to wonder if anyone sees you, really sees you, beyond the hospital bracelet and the chart at the end of your bed. 

I'm healthy now, and I'm grateful beyond words for that gift. But the greatest Christmas I could ask for isn't mine—it's theirs. It's knowing that somewhere, a child will open a box and find a friend waiting for them. A book that might transport them somewhere magical. A reminder that they are thought of and cared for and brave beyond measure.

That they'll feel a little less alone in a moment when loneliness feels impossible to bear.

Because I know what that loneliness feels like. I know what it's like to wonder if anyone remembers you're there. And I know—I know—what it means to hold something soft and be reminded that somewhere, someone cares.

This is why The Noellie Foundation™ exists. Not just to give gifts, but to give what we all need most when we're scared and far from home: the knowledge that we are seen. That our stories matter. That even in our deepest pain, love still finds us.

Every box we send carries that promise. Every plushie, every book, every carefully wrapped gift is a reminder of what I needed most in those hospital rooms:

To know that love hadn't forgotten me.