"This December will be three years on chemo and in that time she’s had it come back a few other times."
This is Addison.
She's one of the children we talked to as part of a series we are working on with University Hospitals and Rainbow Babies and Children's Hospital for Childhood Cancer Awareness Month.
At just 8 years old, Addison is currently battling childhood ependymoma. Right now she has two tumors and she's experiencing her sixth recurrence.
Addison likes playing Uno and taking walks with her dad.
"The first treatment is always surgery and radiation which she did," her mother, Kelly, told us. "But it has a high rate of recurrence. So a lot of kids are cured just fine from radiation and surgery. That was the hope for Addie but hers came back 18 months after radiation."
"We traveled to Boston to get her second surgery there because her surgeon from here at Rainbow moved to Boston. So we wanted to go to somebody we were comfortable with and they hadn’t replaced him here yet. So we went there and then we were trying to determine if we should do radiation or chemo and in that six weeks we were trying to determine, it had grown back to the same size we had just taken out."
Throughout September, you’ll see stories, like Addison's, on our Facebook and Instagram pages, as well as on newsnet5.com.
Kids of University Hospitals: Molly
Kids of University Hospitals: Wilson
Kids of University Hospitals: Piper
Kids of University Hospitals: Luke
