Cancer survivor's goal is to help others at Nicklaus Children's Hospital
MIAMI - Sunday was National Cancer Survivors Day and the staff at Nicklaus Children's Hospital met with childhood cancer survivors.
Christian Aleman was there. His life changed drastically when he was diagnosed with bone cancer at 13 years old.
"I fell doing community service hours there and I started limping, the limp didn't go away for a couple of weeks. I asked my mom to take me to the hospital because there's something wrong with my leg and that's when they discovered I had a tumor," he said.
After 10 rounds of chemotherapy the tumor was gone, then regrowing, and then more chemo, he finally got the news he had been waiting for.
"I was officially cancer free July 4, 2014," he said.
His life changed forever after that. Instead of being a patient at Nicklaus Children's Hospital, he works there.
"Before the cancer I hated needles, I didn't know what I wanted to be in life. Then with the whole experience, all I want to do is give back and help people with cancer and help them get through it," he said.
Working in the hematology and oncology clinic, he's studying to be a nurse.
"That's like all I think about like just giving back the way they helped me. My nurses, the way they helped me," he said.
Lilliam Rimblas was his nurse more than a decade ago. Now they're co-workers. She says working with Christian she feels joy and pride.
"I took care of him when he was a teenager, now he's working with us. Then he was constantly positive, had a bright outlook, he was so positive back then, now he shares that with our patients. And it's very cool and he wants to be an oncology nurse," she said.
