Kaylee is 10 years old and in March of 2011 at the age of 2, she was diagnosed with Stage 4 High Risk Neuroblastoma, a life-threatening childhood cancer. She began her up-front treatment at Cook Children’s Medical Center in Ft. Worth, TX. She endured over a year of chemotherapy, radiation, and stem cell treatments and battled so bravely to achieve remission. She was cancer free for over a year, but in August of 2013, she relapsed for the first time. She has relapsed several more times since, but she doesn’t let that stop her. She continues to fight and is currently in treatment at CHKD in Norfolk, VA and working with Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center in NY and Helen DeVos Children’s Hospital in Michigan. Up until now, she has shown that she can conquer cancer. But her fight is not over, and she will be going through many more extremely difficult treatments. Relapsed Neuroblastoma is among the most difficult of pediatric cancers to treat after relapse and the survivability is extremely rare.
Kaylee has been nicknamed “Warrior Princess”. A true testament to her personality, and a name she certainly lives up to. Her journey has been a very long and arduous one, a journey that no parent ever wants to see their precious child go through. Words cannot express how heart wrenching it is for a family to endure the exhausting battle against this disease. But she is tenacious. And although the ultimate outcome of her cancer is uncertain, she does not let it define her and continues to live her best life.
The Rios family is from Virginia and we hosted them in July 2019.
“Thank you so much for hosting our family. It gave us much need time to reconnect as a family with no hospitals, no chemo, no outside influences.”