AVON, Ohio — September is childhood cancer awareness month, and WKYC is telling the stories of the brave children battling cancer in Northeast Ohio.
Audrey Heath, 8, is a little girl who says cancer won't define her, it won't stop her, and in fact, it's pushing her to help others and raise awareness through funds and research.
Audrey's journey started in May 2020, when she returned to class in Avon after the COVID-19 quarantine. Her teacher noticed her coloring was off compared to the other students — pale and yellow — and within days, Audrey was diagnosed with leukemia at Cleveland Clinic.
"I was scared because I had never been there before," Audrey recalls, "but I knew that the doctors were really nice."
She remembers the little things like the coloring sheet they gave her or the slime she learned how to make. However, her parents, Bill and Nichole, remember the sheer shock.
"You really don't know what to think. You think the worst because you don't really know what it means," Bill said. "We sat there and we prayed for what was going to happen with our lives because we just weren't sure."
Doctors admitted Audrey and a biopsy quickly followed with treatment and many rounds of chemotherapy. She had several setbacks, including an infection that forced her to stay in the ICU.
"[She was] on a ventilator for a while, she was immobile for a while and twice had to learn to walk," Nicole said. "Seeing your 7 or 8-year-old walking like an old person, walking with a limp, it’s just a hard thing to go through.
"She is full of resilience. This kid does hard things every day."
However, the Heath family agrees that the doctors are true miracle workers. Cleveland Clinic Pediatric Oncologist Dr. Seth Rotz has been by Audrey's side since the beginning.
"Throughout all of this, she's taking the hits and she takes it in stride and thinks through it and figures out how she's going to move on," Rotz told us. "And she does that with a tremendous amount of resilience for a kid that age."
"The doctors say there is light at the end of the tunnel, and you can't think about in the moment," Bill said. "I still think I would take it all away today and go through it myself so she wouldn't have to."
Still, he is doing what he can do by riding for a cure with VeloSano — for others like his precious little girl.
"The first year, I rode 10 miles, then 50 miles last year, 50 miles this year, and maybe more in the future," he explained. "We will see."
Together, this family is riding into the next chapter, and way down the road for Audrey, she wants to be a doctor to help others just like her.
"Anything is possible," she says, "and even if things are hard, you can get through them."
