How this got started

Time for a little time traveling back to 1997… Amanda (our cruise hostess) was diagnosed with pauci-articular juvenile rheumatoid arthritis in February 1997 -- a form of arthritis which affects fewer than 5 large joints (hips, knees, ankles, shoulders, elbows, wrists, jaw).

In the grand scheme of things, it could be worse. She didn't have cancer, muscular distrophy, or any other potentially life-threatening disease. She had no visible signs that there was anything wrong with her other than a lump on her knee. More information on arthritis is available at http://www.arthritis.ca/.

Amanda was pretty good with everything until she had to start having injections to bring down the swelling, she didn’t enjoy the joint injections. After three rounds of joint injections it was determined that she should take Methotrexate to help with the swelling of her joints (unfortunately this was a weekly injection instead of just when her joints were swollen). We soon determined that the best way to give her this was while she was sleeping. She has been a trooper throughout the whole ordeal, and always showed a brave face even during her week long quarantine for chicken pox (in the hospital because of the medications she was taking).

She would say “You Gotta Do What you Gotta Do!”. Even with everything that was going on Amanda was able to give all of us Amanderific hugs that would squeeze the stuffing out if you.

One of the side affects for the type of arthritis Amanda has, is that it can affect her eyes causing inflammation, and in Amanda’s case it did. The eye drops that Amanda was and still is taking (at one point 25 per day), caused the pressure in her eye to rise and within six months of starting to take the drops she had to have cataract and glaucoma surgery (approx. a month apart from each other) to relieve the pressure in her eye.

Fast Forward to 2004 I was surfing the web looking for hotrod sites and what do I find www.CanadianRodder.com. What a site it is...it includes information on building cars, pictures of member’s cars and a chat board. After introducing myself and spending a few months asking questions about building my dream car (a woodie), I asked a simple little question, “Is there anything in Canada like the Power-Tour in the US?”.

After a few days of discussion it was determined that I should start it. I had been thinking of a charity event that included hotrods for awhile and I thought it would be fun, and with that Amanda’s Cruise for Juvenile Arthritis was started. The 1st cruise was held in St. Mary's at fat Chuk's hot rod shop & included a cruise up to Goderich, the beach at Grand Bend, and back down to St. Mary's. Read all about it on this blog.

Check out the Amanda's Cruise for Juvenile Arthritis website for details on our current cruise http://ca.geocities.com/acja@rogers.com/

See you in September for a fun day of Cruisin’, Showin’ & BBQin’.

Tim Banic
Cruise Director