{"id":8724,"date":"2021-03-25T15:17:09","date_gmt":"2021-03-25T04:17:09","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/blogs.rch.org.au\/news\/?p=8724"},"modified":"2021-03-29T11:52:52","modified_gmt":"2021-03-29T00:52:52","slug":"such-grace-and-strength-little-rch-patient-is-an-inspiration-to-all-around-her","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blogs.rch.org.au\/news\/such-grace-and-strength-little-rch-patient-is-an-inspiration-to-all-around-her\/","title":{"rendered":"Such Grace and strength \u2013 Little RCH patient is an inspiration to all around her"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><strong>Words:<\/strong>\u00a0Brigid O\u2019Connell, Herald Sun<\/p>\n<p><strong>Photography:<\/strong>\u00a0David Caird, Herald Sun<\/p>\n<p><strong>With her princess dress and runners on, her beloved doll buckled into its pram, Grace hits the track for her morning walk.<\/strong><\/p>\n<p>The two-year old is tethered to an IV pole, but that doesn\u2019t slow her down as she cuts laps of The Royal Children\u2019s Hospital oncology ward.<\/p>\n<p>It\u2019s been a daily ritual \u2013 when she\u2019s been well enough \u2013 to stop and check in on friends across the hall, and finish with a \u00a0pit stop at the nurses\u2019 station to do some drawing on their paperwork.<\/p>\n<p>Grace\u2019s leukaemia diagnosis five months ago shattered her parents Jessica Mekken and Daniel Antonello in just one day. They started the morning with a toddle they were taking to the GP because of concerns about lots of unusual bruising.<\/p>\n<p>They ended that day cradling Grace at the RCH as she underwent a blood transfusion, the first of what would be countless procedures to quash the cancer cells over-running her little body.<\/p>\n<figure id=\"attachment_8727\" aria-describedby=\"caption-attachment-8727\" style=\"width: 204px\" class=\"wp-caption alignright\"><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"wp-image-8727 size-medium\" src=\"https:\/\/blogs.rch.org.au\/news\/files\/2021\/03\/Grace-Antonello-Herald-Sun-David-Caird-1-204x280.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"204\" height=\"280\" \/><figcaption id=\"caption-attachment-8727\" class=\"wp-caption-text\">Grace Antonello 2, Leukaemia patient dresses up in her princess dress. Picture: David Caird<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<p>But Ms Mekken said her daughter was inspiring in how she had adapted to her new way of life, stuck largely in a hospital ward.<\/p>\n<p>\u201cBeing a toddler, it just becomes their life really quickly, because everything is new for them anyway. This just carried on as the next new thing that we\u2019re doing,\u201d Ms Mekken said.<\/p>\n<p>\u201cShe understands each of the procedures. She\u2019ll tell the nurses when they gave to clean her lines. She says, \u2018I\u2019m brave, I\u2019m brave\u2019.<\/p>\n<p>\u201cShe constantly amazes me with her strength. Going for finger pricks or having her port accesses, she sits there and talks the nurses through it as they do their job.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>Long hospital stays have been extra hard because of COVID restrictions banning visitors and shutting down many of the playtime experiences on the ward.<\/p>\n<p>Slowly these chances for interaction and fun \u2013 which social butterfly Grace craves \u2013 are resuming, thankfully at a time she is entering the most gruelling phase of her two-year cancer treatment.<\/p>\n<p>\u201cI just wish for a cure for her,\u201d Ms Mekken said.<\/p>\n<p>\u201cI want Grace to look back at this time and know that she was so strong. I\u2019m so proud of her and so grateful for what they\u2019re doing for her.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>With her princess dress and runners on, her beloved doll bucked into its pram, Grace hits the track for her morning walk.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":190,"featured_media":8727,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[8971,7198,6],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-8724","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-featured","category-good-friday-appeal","category-in-the-news"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.rch.org.au\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8724","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.rch.org.au\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.rch.org.au\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.rch.org.au\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/190"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.rch.org.au\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=8724"}],"version-history":[{"count":6,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.rch.org.au\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8724\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":8734,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.rch.org.au\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8724\/revisions\/8734"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.rch.org.au\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/8727"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.rch.org.au\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=8724"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.rch.org.au\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=8724"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.rch.org.au\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=8724"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}