Ziggy

In Northern Kentucky, a little girl named Ziggy was in the backyard with her family on a spring afternoon.

She was picking strawberries. She was almost two years old. She seemed completely healthy.

Hours later, her parents Dee and Malorie Nolan learned their daughter had cancer.

There were almost no warning signs. Ziggy had been throwing up occasionally, usually when drinking milk, and her grandmother noticed some lumps on her head. Malorie thought maybe she had bumped it somewhere. The kind of thing parents dismiss a hundred times before it turns out to be something.

It turned out to be something.

On May 13, Ziggy was diagnosed with neuroblastoma, a cancer that develops from immature nerve cells and most commonly affects children under five. It is the most common solid tumor outside the brain in young children. In high-risk cases, it is one of the most difficult pediatric cancers to treat.

Ziggy is being treated at Cincinnati Children's Hospital, one of the premier neuroblastoma centers in the country. Her road ahead includes chemotherapy and immunotherapy. The treatment protocol for high-risk neuroblastoma is long, intensive, and grueling for a body that has only been in the world for two years.

Dee and Malorie are now doing something with their pain that they did not have to do.

They are sharing it publicly.

They want other parents to know what they wish they had known before May 13. Get bloodwork done early. Do not wait for symptoms that are obvious. Neuroblastoma in its earliest stages can be caught in routine labs before a child shows any outward sign of illness.

"There was no symptoms. There was no signs," Dee said. "She was picking strawberries in the backyard literally hours prior to finding out that she had cancer."

Northern Kentucky has already wrapped itself around this family. Fundraisers have been organized. The community has shown up in the way small communities do when one of their own is in a fight they did not choose.

Ziggy is almost two years old. She has strawberries to pick and a whole life ahead of her that her parents are fighting to protect.

Please share this so Dee and Malorie know the prayers are coming from far beyond Northern Kentucky, and so every parent reading this schedules the bloodwork they have been putting off.