Redditors answer cancer patient's pleas for pizza
Lauren Hammersley was looking for a fun activity to amuse her children while her 2-year-old daughter Hazel received treatment for cancer. She grabbed some medical tape and decided to make an outside request for pizza on their hospital window.
"Hazel helped us put it up, and was waving to people on the street," Hammersley said to CBSNews.com. "The more we can do to brighten her day is great. We never imagined it would turn into something like this."
A Redditor captured a picture of the family's message and posted it on the social sharing website. Soon, Hammersley was receiving call after call from security that there were pizzas waiting for them downstairs. In all, the family received more than 20 pizzas before they made a polite request to tell people to stop -- and that's not counting more pizzas that they gave to the front desk and security guards.
Hazel, her parents and her three siblings were at Children's Hospital Los Angeles because she was getting treatment for neuroblastoma, a cancer that forms in the adrenal glands right above the kidneys. The cancer begins typically in early childhood before the age of 10, sometimes even before a child is born.
Hazel goes for routine chemotherapy appointments, but had to be observed for a longer period because she had a low white blood cell count.
The 2-year-old was diagnosed with a stage III form of the disease in April. According to the American Cancer Society, children who are in a low-risk group have a 5-year survival rate of about 95 percent. However, Hammersley said Hazel is considered high-risk, which puts her 5-year survival rate around 30 to 50 percent.
Even though the cancer is very aggressive, Hammersley considers the family lucky because it was caught earlier than usual. Most neuroblastomas are diagnosed at stage IV.
"Fortunately, being her age, she doesn't understand her severity," Hammersley explained. "She knows she has something called a neuroblastoma, and it's in her belly, and she needs medicine.... She has a scar on her stomach that she likes to show off because it looks just like 'Madeline.'"
Hammersley had got the idea to post a message on the window from Hazel's grandmother, who had done something similar when she was in the hospital in her 20s. While she didn't get any pizza, she did have people stop by and say hi.
There was enough pizza to go around to have a pizza party in Hazel's room.
"It was so much fun," Hammersley said. "We got to give back to the nurses. They all got to eat, and then several other children came into the room."
Hazel might have had her fill of pizza that night, but Hammersley said the young girl is not sick of pizza just yet. The family was coincidentally planning to host a fundraiser at a pizza parlor in their hometown before the pizza shenanigans happened, and they plan to continue to do so.
However, the best news of all is that Hazel was cleared to go home on Monday.
"She's feeling really good," Hammersley said happily.
