Five-year-old Amelie likes to play. As she puts a blanket over her head to play hide-and-seek she giddily screams “I’m hiding! I’m hiding!”
To see how full of life she is you wouldn’t realize that last summer Amelie was diagnosed with pineoblastoma, a brain cancer found only in children. Doctors removed 60% of the tumor four days later but left the rest of it due to its location.
“She’s our point man. She’s the one actually leading us, which might be contradictory in most people’s minds,” Amelie’s dad Ben told NBC 7. “She’s showing us the way and we’re just kind of adapting.”
Cue Wienerschnitzel and the Roc Solid Foundation for the ‘Play it Forward’ program.
“The family has a lot of stuff to go through,” Wienerschnitzel employee Kim Zupfer said. “What we’re doing is nothing compared to what they’re going through.”
Kim and other volunteers helped build a playground in Amelie’s backyard – a playground that was a surprise to her.
“Play is replaced with doctor’s appointments, with needles, with chemo that makes you so sick you can’t stand it,” founder of Roc Solid Eric Newman said of children like Amelie. “That’s what gets us up in the morning at the foundation and what we go to bed thinking about.”
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Amelie got in a limo provided to her that took her back to her house where she found the new play set complete with a tree house, swing and slide.
“When I pray now I say thank you for yesterday, thank you for today, and thank you for tomorrow,” her father said. “No matter what. Just to keep myself aware that what’s important is right now.”
Amelie immediately began to play in her house, swing on the swing and slide down the slide. Her parents have one more reason to celebrate – doctors can no longer find Amelie’s tumor.
