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12
SPRING
2013
It’s been three years since that fateful day
when the Asfour family felt their world
crumbling around them. On February 7
2009, a doctor informed them that their
precious six year old daughter, Daniella,
had cancer.
It was every parent’s nightmare.The
family, to say the least, went into shock.
Except for Daniella that is. “I have cancer
like Kika?” she said, simply referring to
the family’s helper who was diagnosed
with cancer a year earlier, and then she
went on playing.
And that was it. St. Jude Cancer Center
soon became another home for Daniella.
There was no reason to cry. No reason to
complain. Not even when the ‘butterfly’
was inserted under her skin just above her
chest- a surgically placed catheter to allow
chemotherapy to enter the bloodstream.
Not even through a vigorous year of che-
motherapy and its exhausting effects.
There were, after all, new people to meet
at the Center. New children to befriend.
There was Tina who, at only four, was
getting ready for her chemo session.
She looked petrified. “Don’t be scared,”
assured her Daniella, “everything is going
to be ok.”
And out of her bag, Daniella would
produce drawing books, crayons and
whatever her new friends needed.
“She is so strong,” said her mother, Carla
Asfour. “She reminds me that I have to be
strong. Sometimes I am the one who is
nervous and she is the one who tells me,
‘it’s ok mama’”
It is this spirit that drove Andree Sahyoun
Maaraoui, a family friend, to write “Dani-
ella and the Dolphins” last October in an
IC’s miracle child:
Daniella and the Dolphins