Local Five-Year-Old Danced to Celebrate Life, Give Back to Community

As the community celebrated the fourth annual, city-wide Chicago Dance Marathon on Saturday, March 2nd, our family participated not only to honor the kids treated every day at Ann & Robert H. Lurie Children’s Hospital of Chicago, but to celebrate our five-year-old daughter, Harlow’s, medical journey.

Harlow is in her third season of ballet and tap.  Like many girls her age, she skips into her dance classes with utter delight and practices weekly for the big recital. But Harlow’s journey to becoming a ballerina is unlike that of the other girls in her class. At four months old, tests revealed a grapefruit-sized mass was blocking her kidneys. She received four three-week rounds of chemotherapy. Thankfully, prior to Harlow’s birth, we chose to bank her cord blood with ViaCord without thinking she would ever need to use it. Because we had the cord blood, Harlow was able to undergo a life-saving double stem cell transplant from her own stem cells to ensure the aggressive tumor did not grow back.

Cord blood stem cells have been used in the treatment of nearly 80 diseases , including certain kinds of cancer and blood diseases. To learn more about cord blood banking, visit www.viacord.com.

As a result of chemotherapy and her stem cell transplants, Harlow is able to slip on her dancing shoes and embrace the joys of being a little girl. This month she was able to do just that at the Dance Marathon event.