Child Life Week: This week, we’re celebrating our Child Life Specialists at Cook Children’s who make an impact on the emotional safety of children and families in health care.By Lauren Bridge, MS, CCLS, AYA Child Life Specialist at Cook Children’s He...
World Cancer Day on Feb. 4 is an important day to raise awareness about prevention, detection, and treatment. Started by the Union for International Cancer Control in 2008, World Cancer Day activities seek to significantly reduce illness and death ca...
By Ashley AntleLarger than life-size digital displays, storybook murals, walking paths that invite exploration and play, and spaces bathed in every color of the rainbow — it’s what childhood daydreams and imaginations are made of. These are also a fe...
By Ashely Antle It’s hard to imagine how a stroke could be a blessing in disguise, but Joseph and Allison Turner believe it was for their son, Owen, when he was just 8 months old.“The stroke caused all kinds of battles that we’re still battling today...
By Jean YaegerAiden Snyder responded with determination and positivity when his leukemia came back again and again and again after his initial diagnosis at age 4.With each relapse, Aiden’s doctors tried a new approach to combat the rogue cells overta...
By Gina BestAsked what makes her mighty, Makenzie Chapa flexes her biceps and flashes a smile.“I have muscles,” she says with an upward tilt of her chin.Those who meet the precocious 7-year-old would no doubt agree she’s strong. But so much more radi...
By Heather DugeJoann Sanders, M.D., chief quality officer, and Matthew Carroll, M.D., associate chief quality officer, credit Cook Children’s employees with top rankings in the U.S. News & World Report’s Best Children’s Hospital list for 2022-2023. C...
List ranks Cook Children’s among the best children’s hospitals for pediatric cancer, cardiology, endocrinology, neurology/neurosurgery, orthopedics and pulmonologyCook Children’s Health Care System has successfully achieved six rankings in the U.S. N...
Samantha Harris, a nurse manager of the Hematology-Oncology Center at Cook Children’s Medical Center, has been nominated as a candidate for Leukemia & Lymphoma Society’s Woman of the Year.“As a leukemia survivor and pediatric oncology nurse here at C...
To the parent of a child with a terminal illness, the value of a day, a week, a month or a year can not be measured. Each minute of life is precious as they and their child fight for every single one. Sometimes that fight includes incorporating the u...
• The 15th annual The Blast will take place on April 2, 2022 at Panther Island Pavilion in Fort Worth. Visit blastwalk.org to sign up.• Michael and Elesha were patients at Cook Children's, fighting neuroblastoma. Learn how a promise between friends ...
A treatment now offered at Cook Children’s Medical Center is giving children with relapsed B-cell acute lymphoblastic leukemia (B-ALL)—the most common childhood cancer—a second chance for a cure. It’s called CAR T-cell therapy, or chimeric antigen re...
The oncology team at Cook Children’s had calculated a high probability that the chemotherapy Zechariah Silva needed to fight Hodgkin’s lymphoma would damage the cells in his reproductive organs.So before starting chemo, Zechariah underwent a quick su...
A video shared in September of Cook Children's patient Aiden Yielding, 13, and his dad, Chuck, dancing together from a distance during Aiden’s chemo treatments quickly went viral and captured the hearts of millions around the world. The latest set of...
Ever since Aiden Yielding was first diagnosed with acute lymphocytic leukemia (ALL), his family has been his personal hype team. The 14 year old was diagnosed at the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic, around the same time hospital visitation policie...
After battling fevers for three months, Isabel and Ignacio Rodriguez took their son Matt to his local pediatrician. His physician took blood work and consulted with Cook Children’s oncologist Kenneth Heym, M.D.
“His pediatrician said he didn’t loo...
For two nurse residents at Cook Children’s, walking a mile in a patient’s shoes isn’t too hard to imagine because they’ve been there, or rather, here. Jason Schilder and Emily Whitworth have both experienced life as a patient at Cook Children’s. In f...
For Leah Vann, wearing a mask and keeping social distance is nothing new. While many of us are adjusting to this way of life, she adopted these practices 10 years ago as a young cancer patient at Cook Children’s. She says that experience has prepared...
By Ashley Parrott
In August 2017, Ethan was playing tag with his cousins around the house when he fell. His mom, Lauren Findley, kept asking him what was wrong, but after a few minutes of coaxing, she and her husband quickly realized Ethan needed ...
There's a new record holder at Cook Children's Medical Center. Nine-year-old Gabriel completed an ULTRA Marathon Tuesday, which is 52.6 miles. For the past six months, Gabriel has tracked the number of laps he's walked around the hematology/oncology ...
By now, you may have been one of the more than 350,000 people across the country who watched the video featuring Joey Belles, a Cook Children's Hematology and Oncology patient, complete his version of a marathon last month. If not, you can still watc...
Walking into 13-year-old Joey Belles’ hospital room, it’s hard to miss the abundance of sloths. There are stuffed sloths on tables and sloth stickers on the walls. The sloth is Joey’s spirit animal, though you wouldn’t know it by looking at him now.
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Most of us know someone who has had cancer. That’s because we are all at risk for developing the disease. Usually it’s by chance. But in some cases, cancer develops because of our genetics and that means some of us are predisposed to developing diffe...
Every three minutes someone in the United States is diagnosed with a blood cancer such as leukemia, lymphoma and myeloma. For 70% of those patients, the only hope for a cure is a bone marrow transplant from someone outside of their family.
This is...
Bellanne (Bel) Coonrod never met a stranger. To Bel, everyone could use a little extra love, especially on the Hematology and Oncology floor of Cook Children’s.
Bel knew the hallways of Cook Children’s well. Born with a medley of complex medical d...
As the parents of six, Dave and Jeanie Caselman have mastered the art of handling whatever life throws at them. Whether it’s school events, sports, graduating from high school or starting college, they thought they had experienced it all with the...
By Ashley Parrott
Christian Englert was born with genetic hand tremors, like many of his family members. The tremors were never an issue, especially when he was drumming or doing school work … until he turned 15 when they helped diagnose a rare br...
By Ashley Parrott
Life as a parent with a child who has Sickle Cell Disease (SCD) is already frightening enough, but could you imagine this diagnosis with two of your kids?
Mykhia and Malik, now 11 and 12 years old, were diagnosed with SCD with...
Are you between 18-44? You could save a life through the Be The Match program. Joining the Be The Match Registry means volunteering to be listed as a potential blood stem cell donor, ready to save the life of any patient in need of a transplant.
Y...
This is my sweet patient Olivia.
Olivia is 7 years old and has fought a battle that most 7 year olds (and 70 year olds) have never and will never face.
Olivia has spent the last two years in and out of Cook Children’s battling neuroblastoma. It...