Meet Ben
Ben loves playing Xbox, basketball and street hockey.
And through all the tough stuff his cancer treatment brought, from needles to nose tubes, you rarely see Ben without a smile on his face.
Ben is a kind boy who loves basketball, street hockey and camping! After receiving — and beating — a rare cancer diagnosis within a year, Ben can get back to doing the things he loves.
In May 2019, Ben woke up in the middle of the night complaining of stomach pain. His mom checked him out, noticing he had a fever and one side of his stomach was hard and protruding. They immediately took Ben to their local hospital, where doctors sent them to the Stollery Children’s Hospital for an ultrasound and further testing. At the Stollery, experts discovered Ben had an unfavourable Wilms tumour — a form of childhood kidney cancer. Ben was admitted to the Stollery immediately, and two days later he had surgery to remove a 15 cm tumour, one of his kidneys and his spleen.
Ben went on to have more than 30 weeks of intense chemotherapy and six rounds of radiation, which wrapped up on Christmas Eve 2019. Ben and his family rang in 2020 with clean scans — and he has since celebrated three years of being in remission. Ben has a 90 per cent chance of living a cancer-free life, but he will continue to visit and be monitored by the Stollery’s oncology team for the rest of his life.