Kyle Harvey is barely 20, but he has already survived two serious cancers.
In 1994, Valerie Harvey took her son, Kyle, to the emergency room after he got sick while in kindergarten. What looked like appendicitis turned out to be a ruptured tumor in his abdomen. The tumor turned out to be rhabdomyosarcoma, a cancerous growth that originates in the soft tissues of the body.
Kyle was treated with eight months of chemotherapy and several months of radiation. Then while playing on his high school tennis team in 2004, he felt pain in his right knee.
“We went back to the University of Chicago expecting to hear that Kyle had a sports injury,” said Valerie. Instead, an x-ray showed that Kyle had a malignant tumor in the proximal tibia of his right knee. A biopsy revealed the tumor was osteosarcoma.
“Kyle is a remarkable person,” said orthopedic surgeon Rex Haydon, MD, PhD, assistant professor of surgery. “It would have been so easy to become very discouraged, but he kept marching through all of his care.”
Due to advances in chemotherapy treatment in recent years and to limb salvage surgery, Haydon and James Nachman, MD, professor of pediatrics and the oncologist who treated both of Kyle’s cancers, were able to save Kyle’s leg. In addition to six rounds of chemotherapy, Kyle underwent limb salvage and reconstruction surgery.
“Facing cancer a second time was clearly devastating,” said Nachman. “He fought through it and managed to finish high school on time and go on to college.”
In the summer of 2007, Madison, 10, was starring as one of the Scouts in “To Kill a Mockingbird” at the Avon theatre in Stratford. By the time the fall came, she started to complain of exhaustion and back pain. Extremely worried, her parents took her to a hospital. A blood test revealed alarming results and Madison was referred to The Hospital for Sick Children. There, they discovered she had acute lymphoblastic leukemia (ALL).
