Gift Stories

While Team Summer waits for the coronavirus to pass and it’s safe for kids with cancer to be together again, we’re telling some stories of past gifts! Nine-year-old Patrick slowly started acting differently. He was tired and didn’t want to play. Then one day, his pupils got very large, and his body began to get…

  On November 11th, the seventh anniversary of Summer Dale’s passing, Team Summer launched its annual Matching Gift Fund! A group of amazing Team Summer supporters have pledged a pool of $20,000 and challenged donors to match it! That means if you contribute $50, Team Summer gets $100; if you donate $100, Team Summer gets…

Anyone who follows our Team Summer kids knows how difficult chemo treatments can be on their bodies. But no one knows that better than 21-year-old Kristen. If she had been able to follow the path she set for herself, she’d have had her nursing degree by last May. But brain cancer, discovered about a year…

When 14-year-old Ethan discovered a hard lump on his head, no one knew what to make of it. He couldn’t remember bumping his head, and his blood work, x-ray, CT scan, and ultrasound showed nothing wrong. Then a biopsy found it: lymphoma. That was back in March 2017. Since then, here is what Ethan has…

For Easton, it all began last March when he woke up in the middle of the night with a bad pain on his right side. His mom thought it was probably appendicitis and immediately took him to the emergency room. Unfortunately, it was something worse. Doctors found a mass in his kidney. It was cancer….

It all started out so great. But sometimes things don’t turn out the way you planned…they turn out even better! Remember this girl? Team Summer kid Caroline! In the picture below, she is seeing her Team Summer gift for the first time – a swing set! Well, as you might imagine, since Team Summer kids…

For Maddox, cancer started with just a tiny bit of swelling on his neck, near his jawline. And then over the next few months, the swelling got worse. Turns out it was leukemia. He’s had to have chemo every week since last November. Ugh. Even though he’s only five years old, Maddox was really upset…

A couple of years ago, 17-year-old DeeDee felt some swelling in her neck. Then her doctor found her lymph nodes were swollen, too. He sent her to the emergency room, where doctors there put her in an ambulance to a bigger hospital. The diagnosis: lymphoma. DeeDee was facing years of tough cancer treatments. Not what…

Most kids with cancer have symptoms that lead up to their diagnosis. Not 20-year-old Cody. He got hit in the head. Literally. He was out with some friends at a baseball game a few years ago when an errant ball nailed him. As a precaution, he went to the hospital to get checked out. At…

Any kid with cancer will tell you that having the disease is isolating. You’re in the hospital all the time, separated from your friends. And when you lose all your hair, you look really different, too. And it is extra hard if you have to watch all your friends go off to college, and you…