5-year-old Seth Lane was born with a life-threatening health problem, and 26 million people have watched his Snapchat story
If you checked out the Stories section of Snapchat over the weekend, you may have found one titled, "Wear Yellow for Seth."
The story was an awareness campaign for a 5-year-old boy in England named Seth Lane, who has an immunodeficiency disorder that's commonly called "Bubble Boy Syndrome." Lane's health issue makes him incredibly susceptible to illnesses if he isn't in a completely sterile environment, which means he's spent much of his young life in the hospital.
The boy was diagnosed when he was just a few months old and on March 27, he was scheduled to have a second bone marrow transplant which could help save his life. With the help of his parents, he asked people on social media to wear yellow to support him and cheer him up.
His parents promised to take all the images of people wearing yellow, print them out, and hang them in his hospital room.
"[Yellow] perks him up when he's feeling rubbish, really." Lane's mother told ABC. "We said we're going to hang them [photos] all up, but I think there's going to be a lot more pictures than we thought. I think we'll need a football stadium."
A bunch of #wearyellowforseth supports can be seen here.
Seth's story made the rounds earlier this month. He was featured on ABC and DailyMail. Snapchat contacted the family after Lane's story started going viral. Over the weekend, Snapchat geofenced Lane's hospital and collected yellow snaps from people in Los Angeles, New York, Boston, Chicago and London to let people know about the campaign.
Soon, celebrities like Ashton Kutcher were tweeting and snapping their yellow outfits to show support for Lane. Snapchat says 26 million people viewed Seth's Snapchat story over a two day period.
Here's a snap of Lane's mother, thanking all the Snapchat supporters:
Here's the Snapchat office supporting Seth too.
And here are other Seth supporters around the world who contributed to this past weekend's Snapchat story:
And here's Seth sleeping after his surgery:
Seth doesn't appear to be out of the woods yet. His parents wrote a post-surgery blog post here.
Here's the original video Seth's parents posted asking the world to wear yellow on March 11.