Dance Marathon

This may be a little far-fetched, but I think it works.
This weekend was the Rutgers University Dance Marathon, which raises money and awareness for the Embrace Kids foundation. The Embrace Kids foundation supports kids and families of kids with cancer, sickle cell, and other blood disorders. The foundation is local, and the money goes straight to the families who are in serious need of financial support due to the extreme cost of their medical bills. At Dance Marathon, the dancers pledge at least $320 to stand on their feet and dance for 32 hours straight for the kids, with no sleep or sitting breaks. If you are caught doing either, you are yelled at by a security guard to get up and star dancing for the kids.
This event is wonderful, and we raised over $323K this year. However, the amount of work and stress your body must go through for 32 hours is, according to my friends and I who participated, torture. By hour 15, your feet became swollen and itchy, and relief was a far 17 hours away. Some of us became delusional, creating dramatic scenarios that ended in tears because we did not know how to deal with the pain we were feeling. We weren't just cranky from being tired, but we were hurting for the serious need to sit down and relieve ourselves. A trip to the EMT didn't even help my friend when she felt as if she was going to pass out from the lack of food the even provided, especially at 4 AM, when you couldn't even persuade one of your friends to drop off a bagel or crackers for you.
I guess the Marathon is supposed to symbolize the amount of physical pain and stress these children and their families have to go through as they battle cancer. Their bodies literally must fight to survive, and their families try to do everything to save them. Unfortunately, two of the children and their families in Embrace kids lost the battle against cancer this year. The amount of pain that our bodies felt for a short 32 hours was well worth fighting to keep the children in Embrace Kids alive, and at the end of the Marathon, we were all in tears. We had done something bigger than our bodies, bigger than ourselves. Our minds fought the will to sit down and to sleep and we won. It was all "FTK!" (For the Kids)