Last Christmas season Seattle Seahawks quarterback Russell Wilson, left, and tight end Cooper Helfet visited Parker Walsh and his mother Cindy at Seattle Children's Hospital. Parker, from Chehalis, has been cared for by the hospital over the years. His mother Cindy will be the keynote speaker at the upcoming Friday, Dec. 4 Adaline Coffman Guild, which raised money to help pay for Lewis County children's care at the hospital.
Cindy Walsh is the keynote speaker for the upcoming Adaline Coffman Guild’s 75th Anniversary Gala gathering Friday at the Washington Hotel in Chehalis.
The guild, in existence since 1940 in Lewis County, has raised more than $500,000 for Seattle Children’s Hospital and currently serves about 600 children from Lewis County on an annual basis.
Walsh, from Chehalis, is intimately informed of Seattle Children’s Hospital value. Her son Parker Walsh, now 20, was born with a rare medical condition, so rare it is considered possibly one of a kind. Cindy Walsh said the best theory doctors have come up with is he may have been twins that did not split. Parker lives with a laundry list of special needs and medical conditions that have seen him hospitalized several times in his young life. He has spent a good amount of time receiving care at Seattle Children’s Hospital.
“Parker has always had a lot of special needs,” Cindy said in an earlier interview with The Chronicle.
But despite the challenges that he faces in life, friends and family say Parker has always had a positive, can-do attitude.
Parker, known to some as “Parkerman,” is a bit of a Lewis County celebrity, as friends and family have banded together to both raise money for medical expenses and to bring joy into his life. In the past few years they threw an evening of dance called “Parkerball” at the Lewis and Clark Hotel in Centralia, hosted him on a fishing trip, coordinated a VIP visit to the Seattle Mariners and even had him helping out at prep sports radio broadcasts at W.F. West.
A highlight was a visit from Seattle Seahawks quarterback Russell Wilson during last year’s Christmas season. Cindy said she knew Wilson comes to Children’s Hospital almost every Tuesday. Since there are obviously a lot of families that would like to visit with him, Wilson chooses the kids he visits through recommendations from the nurses, who write letters up about the history and medical condition of each kid they recommend. She said Wilson spent about 15 minutes with Parker looking at his sports photos on his walls and gave him some new memorabilia to hang.
“That was awesome,” Cindy said. “It was really cool.”
Recently Parker has received positive medical news, as an imaging scan revealed he is 100 percent clean of a stomach cancer ailment, which allows the young man to proceed with a trial medication for a chronic condition of fluid in the lungs.
