My name is Leigha Hoffner and I am the mother of a 3 year old son named Jamil. My son has a deadly rare genetic disease called Bassen Kornzweig Syndrome. This disease is costing my son his eye sight, he cannot speak, and is severely delayed. This disease has no cure and the only treatment available only helps prolong blindness. My son’s life expectancy is 5 years old. Because of what he and my family have been through I have started a foundation called A Cure for Bassen Kornzweig Foundation. However, right now my son’s doctor is unable to treat him anymore because she does not know what else to do with him. My son according to experts is the only one in this state that has this disease and from the 17 different doctors that we have been to not a single one of them have heard of this nor know how to treat him. I am a mother and I do not want my son to die. I have no other options. I do not know what else to do to help save my son but I will not stop in my efforts. I am asking for your help in any way that you can, from referrals to doctors, helping bring awareness of this disease to supporting the foundation, to sponsoring my son and the other little boys who have this disease so that we can find a cure.

I cannot image what life will be like without my son or how badly the world will suffer from him not being here.

Thank you and God bless you for helping.

Leigha Hoffner and Jamil

Also creepy – the Mormon commercial about the kid who tells a lie, then all of these freaks start hounding him and singing a sinister-sounding song: “When you tell one lie, it leads to another; then you tell two lies to cover each other…”

One that used to run on Saturday mornings about how we should eat our cheese had some cartoon cowboy singing “I hanker fer a hunk of cheese!” Then he put a slice of cheese in between 2 huge round crackers and said “Look, a wagon wheel!” Yeeeee-haw!

I think it was a PSA- I was about 4 when I saw it, but it’s scarred me forever. I was especially scared a few years later when I needed to get glasses. I still think about it every so often.

When I was 5, my parents took me and my sister to the movies a lot, and they had this commercial, telling everyone not to smoke, talk or be rowdy in theaters. They showed Barbie dolls smoking, talking, and being rowdy, and the barbies got sucked up by vacuums. It scared the crap out of poor little me. I thought if I so much as whispered during the movie, I’d get sucked up and never be seen again.

I still can’t talk, smoke, or be rowdy in theaters without checking for a vacuum.