It was the first Sunday of April when the family noticed Emily was short of breath while playing basketball. The straight-A second-grader’s family took her the hospital for tests for possible asthma, but a CT scan only revealed a far worse situation. Emily had a tumor bigger than a softball in her left lung. It quickly collapsed her left lung and shifted both her heart and airway, leaving her breathing only with 20% of one lung.

Emily’s mom refers to her daughter as her “little rubber bouncing ball.” Whatever the challenge or situation, she tends to bounce back and keeps on moving. “That’s what she is. She’s 20 pounds underweight,” Emily’s mom said. “She is a stick. Her legs look like toothpicks, and that doesn’t slow her down. She does not care that she is bald; she keeps bouncing back.”  Even as she battles a diagnosis of stage III T-cell lymphoblastic non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma, this 8 year old is bouncing her way through chemotherapy and on to recovery…and since our Team Endure to Cure members have been out raising a sweat on her behalf, now she is stopping to hang out with celebrities along the way!

Emily and her family were treated to a limo ride, concert and backstage meeting with her idol, Selena Gomez. Meeting the Disney Channel starlet couldn’t have made Emily happier, said her mom. “She felt so special being in a limo, meeting a star. It’s every girl’s dream.  Emily is an angel. I feel like she is an angel walking among us. She brings out the good in people; she is so pure,” said her mom. “She just has the best heart in the world, and she inspires me every day. She gives me the strength.”