The day my 5 year old son was diagnosed with FSGS, his life stopped being in my control the way it had been only the night before. As a way of dealing and coping with the new, harsh reality of our lives, I immersed myself in reading anything and everything the Internet offered me about his disease. It was then that I realized my son now has the disease that led Alonzo Mourning to needing a kidney transplant. My research grew to reading about his struggles and triumphs with FSGS and that's when I found Resilience. I immediately purchased 5 paperback copies, to give to friends and families, and downloaded copies to my iPad and iPhone. Reading this book brought me to tears more often than I can count, but not always for negative reasons, more often it was because of the connection I felt with Alonzo Mourning in his work giving back to the communities that touched his life. As a high school English teacher, I decided to purchase more copies of the book to have on hand in my classroom for my students to read for pleasure. There are SO MANY LESSONS to be learned through the reading of Resilience, and I can NOT wait to have my students learn them. The struggles Alonzo pushed through to achieve success will be some that many of my kids have encountered, but succumbed to instead of fighting through. I believe that his story will give them the strength and determination to believe in themselves and in the value of education, even IF they don't have that support coming from their own families. This story has given me hope and faith for my own son's future. He is young, with his whole life ahead of him, and though we don't have millions of dollars to get the best doctors, we have the ability to gain knowledge about his disease and stop at NOTHING to battle it. While doing so, we will hold fundraisers and do walks to increase awareness and knowledge about FSGS and Nephrotic Syndrome. Even if my son is not a direct recipient of the results of research that our fundraising helps to fund, someone else's son or daughter WILL be....and that is something I CAN control.