St. Jude’s Patient Gets Her Wish
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It’s a dream come true for Amber Stansell. For her, countless treatments to battle cancer are the norm. But thanks to “Make A Wish”, this St. Jude patient can say “Aloha” to those treatments on a tropical getaway. An assembly at Peabody High School Wednesday morning was all about literacy – or at least that’s what Amber Stansell thought. Actually, it was all about her. The teen, who has never seen the ocean or in the inside of an airplane, was the last student to read. But the words on the page weren’t from the children’s book – but a poem granting her the wish of a lifetime. “I was very overwhelmed. It was a lot of emotions in one,” said Amber. “I was excited and surprised and just ecstatic. It was great.” Amber, a patient at St. Jude, wished to escape somewhere tropical and far away from doctors and hospitals. “I’ve always dreamed of going to Hawaii since I was a little kid,”said Amber. “I want to see animals that are in the ocean besides what we see in Tennessee. Like dolphins or something like that.” The teen and her family will take the once-in-a-lifetime trip after a six month battle with Hodgkin’s Lymphoma. “The thing about when your child has cancer, it becomes a ‘we’ instead of a ‘them’ or an ‘I’,” said Amber’s mother, Kimberly Perry. “And we all went through everything. We may not have had all the physical pain that she had, but our hearts hurt for her.” Amber says she’s ready to move past that pain and pack her bags for the Aloha State. “I’m going to go to the beach, and just sit there, and not think about anything else, and not talk to nobody,” laughed Amber. “Just sit there and watch the ocean.” Amber finished treatment in March, and just three days after her 16th birthday, she was pronounced cancer-free. She and her family head to Hawaii at the end of this month.
