Determined to get back in the game

Seventeen-year-old Kyle Arieta lives for football, but as his mother is quick to note, football doesn’t define him. Instead, she points to a quiet determination that he’s learned from his years on the playing field. It’s an attitude of pushing through and moving beyond that’s served him well in the game, and which drove him to get back on his feet after the brain tumor. When the southeastern Massachusetts native went to bed one night last May, he’d been having headaches off and on for a while. They weren’t all that bad, more like a mild cold that wouldn’t go away. That next morning, though, it was clear that the headaches had been a sign of something more. Kyle awoke in head-splitting pain—and nearly blind. By the end of the day, he was at Boston Children’s Hospital, where neurosurgeons performed emergency surgery to remove a tumor growing in his pituitary gland—a pea-sized part of the brain that acts like a control room for the body’s hormones. We had no idea that anything had been wrong,” says his mother, Joanne Rebelo. But after a trip to their local hospital turned into an ambulance ride to Boston Children’s it was clear that something, indeed was wrong. “All we knew was that they found a mass in his brain. That’s when everything kind of flipped upside down for us,” Joanne says. Kyle and his family were met at Boston Children’s emergency room by a neurosurgical team led by Edward...
Source: Thrive, Children's Hospital Boston - Category: Pediatrics Authors: Tags: All posts Dana-Farber/Boston Children's Cancer and Blood Disorders Center Edward Smith football neurosurgery our patients' stories Source Type: news