Eye of the tigers very own Joseph Tilahun has made blankets every Christmas for the past decade with his mom and donates them to chemo patients at Kaiser. Joseph and his mom started this tradition after Tilahun was going through chemo therapy at seven years old and many of his family gave him gifts but the gift he appreciated the most was the blanket his mom made for him as the room he had to get treatment in was extremely freezing. After another kid struggling in the hospital asked if they could make him one, Joseph and his mom decided that they could make it a tradition to give blankets to all the patients. 

“When I was 7 years old, I had cancer. And so every Wednesday, I’d go to the hospital for chemotherapy, and that place was cold. So my mom made me a little aeroscape blanket and it was warm, it was good, it was nice, and so after I finished remission, we went back and started giving away blankets like that for every Christmas,” Tilahun said.

Tilahun plans to give blankets to more patients this year to celebrate the 10th anniversary of donating blankets  

 “Since I was seven so about ten years now or this will be the tenth year except for around two years during quarantine where we weren’t allowed to give. Each year we check with the nurse that my mom knows and we see how many people are in the outpatient, although this year we are hoping to get to the inpatient as well due to the fact that it’s our tenth anniversary doing this,” Tilahun said.

After Tilahun and his mom donate the blankets, the nurses later tell them about the patient’s positive reaction to the blankets.

“We don’t get to see their reactions, we just give them to the hospital because you know the kids are immunocompromised, so we hear from the nurses and they usually say things go over pretty well,” Tilahun said.