An Inspirational Tale: 7-Year-Old CreateSpace Author Raises Money for Seizure DogsI absolutely love reading stories about young children doing extraordinary things, and Evan Moss is definitely an extraordinary little man. Evan suffers from Tuberous Sclerosis and Epilepsy, which causes severe and life-threatening seizures that typically require medical intervention. When he was a baby, he was having a whopping 400-500 seizures every single month. At age four, he underwent brain surgery, which drastically reduced the number of seizures he was having, but he still has 3 or 4 each month.

The Moss family needed to raise money to buy Evan a specially-trained dog from the non-profit 4 Paws for Ability organization. These dogs are trained to detect when a seizure is about to occur, as the body’s chemicals change right before a seizure and the dog’s sensitive nose can pick this up. They are also trained to know what to do during a seizure and can provide comfort and security.

Although the group is non-profit, Evan’s family still needed to raise $13,000. The average cost of training and placing a service dog is about $22,000, and 4 Paws for Ability asks the families to raise at least $13,000 of that cost.

As part of the application process, Evan had to tell the selection committee about himself, so he got creative and wrote a book called My Seizure Dog.  He even illustrated it all by himself. His family decided to use the book as a fundraising tool and went through CreateSapce, the self-publishing platform. Using the tools on the site, Evan was able to create a paperback version of his book, which he sold on Amazon for $10 per copy. The book was a huge hit, and soon Evan had more than enough money for his dog. Not only that, he continued raising money and is using it to buy specially trained dogs for other children.

People Magazine is holding a “Readers Choice Hero” competition that awards the grand prize winner with $10,000, which Evan will put towards helping another child acquire their seizure dog. You can vote by clicking this link https://styleentertainment.timeinc.net/people/readerhero/. Voting ends on October 13th.

 

Note- Although I was contacted by a PR agency to write about this, I was not compensated in any way for this post. I agreed to write about it because it is a great cause and I feel that Evan Moss is an extraordinary child who deserves recognition.