Meet Maddie

Her full name is Madeline Finley Poynter. Finley means "fair-haired warrior" in Gaelic. My husband and I chose the name to honor my Irish heritage but never knew how fitting it would be until our beautiful, blonde-haired toddler was diagnosed with childhood cancer in June of 2009. Maddie was 2.5 years old when I brought her in to urgent care for dry-heaving. Her behavior had sharply declined for the month prior to that fateful Saturday morning. She was having horrible night terrors, waking up screaming and hitting me and her father as we tried to soothe her. We pulled her out of daycare because she began to have these behaviors during the day, too. The doctors dismissed it as being “part of the terrible two’s.” But when I brought her into the ER that day, the doctor assigned to examine Maddie knew immediately what was wrong….he had been part of diagnosing the only other case of Wilms Tumor known in the area. After the scans proved true – Maddie had a large mass in her left kidney – we were sent by ambulance to Upstate Medical University Hospital, an hour away. Maddie was riddled with tumor; the doctors made the decision to start treating her with chemotherapy immediately before getting the results of the biopsy as Maddie was being choked from the inside by the many tentacles that branched out from the main tumor in her kidney. Eventually she was diagnosed with a rare form of kidney cancer found in children called Wilms Tumor. Maddie was stage IV in her kidney, lungs and heart and stage III in her abdomen. Maddie was treated in Syracuse at Update Medical University Hospital (now Golisano’s Children’s Hospital) and Boston Children’s Hospital where she had her surgery to remove the tumors. On October 8th, after months of chemo to try to shrink the tumors down, Maddie underwent a complicated 12-hour surgery guided by two general surgeons, a heart surgeon and a vascular surgeon to remove her left kidney and to remove all of the tumors from her body. During this surgery Maddie’s body was iced down in order to stop all bodily function; she was clinically dead for 44 minutes while the heart surgeon pulled the tumor from her heart. Unfortunately Maddie’s one good remaining kidney, thinking she had passed, began to shut down that night post-surgery and she was rushed back into the OR the next morning for an emergency 9-hour surgery to save her life. We lived in Boston for 33 days, 3 of those weeks in the ICU. I will never know how she had the strength to live on. We brought her home in November, celebrated Thanksgiving as Maddie learned to walk again, and then geared up for 3 straight weeks of intensive radiation that ended on Christmas Eve morning. Maddie was declared cancer-free on January 11, 2010 and despite a relapse scare, has been cancer-free ever since.
Images by: KellyAnnePhotography