Patient Stories

At the age of 16, Andrea Coggins was in the best shape of her young life, thanks to a high-intensity dance program that required her to dance three hours a day, five days a week. When she started feeling severe hip pain, the natural conclusion was that it was related to her dancing, not to its real cause -- non-Hodgkin's lymphoma.

When six-year-old Yehuda Furman developed sudden, unexplainable leg pain, cancer was the last thing his parents and local doctors suspected. The eventual diagnosis of Ewing's sarcoma, and the possibility that he might never walk again, was initially almost too great a shock for the Furmans to comprehend when they sought treatment at Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center.

Emily Wang was diagnosed at the age of two with a rare childhood cancer known as neuroblastoma. Three days before completing her original treatment, doctors discovered that the cancer had spread to her brain.

Caroline Watters's problems began almost from the moment she entered this world, in November 1999, when she was born premature and anemic. For the first two years of her life, she was in and out of doctors' offices, but no one could conclusively establish what was causing her dangerously low blood platelet counts. That all changed when she was diagnosed at the age of two with myelodysplastic syndrome (MDS).

Reaping the benefits of an extraordinary medical breakthrough as a toddler, Daniel Erd had to suffer through months of misdiagnosis and life-threatening complications before triumphing over a rare cancer of the sympathetic nervous system known as neuroblastoma.

Life as the White family knew it changed forever on November 14, 2005, the day their daughter Victoria, of Phoenix, Arizona, was diagnosed with Wilms' tumor. Having survived the day and its aftermath, which was marked by Victoria's courage and tenacious effervescence, they now consider November 14 their own Veterans Day.

Before Nate arrived at Memorial Sloan-Kettering, doctors gave the five-year-old sarcoma patient little chance of surviving, with amputation of his entire leg the only treatment choice.

A hero at age ten: Jackson's battle with acute lymphoblastic leukemia.

The inspirational story of Weldon's triumph over a rare form of non-Hodgkin's lymphoma.

Perry's dramatic battle with trilateral retinoblastoma.