Pictures capture sick child’s triumph
Flashes of Hope boosts awareness of childhood cancer
It is a portrait of a 4-year-old girl, Gia Danninger, taken at Children’s Hospital of Wisconsin in the fall of 2017. And it is extraordinary.
Possibly what you might notice first is that Gia is bald.
Gia, who lives in Oconomowoc with her mom, Jenna, her dad, Anthony, and her older brother, Jude, was diagnosed with aplastic anemia. It is a rare condition. Essentially, bone marrow failure. Her body was unable to produce enough new blood cells.
A month before the photograph was taken, Gia had received a bone marrow transplant. In preparation for the transplant, Gia had spent a week undergoing chemotherapy.
Gia had long chestnut-colored hair. It had been cut perhaps twice in her life. When, after the chemo, it began to fall out in clumps, Jenna and Anthony shaved her head.
Gia cried and cried. She could not bear to look in a mirror.
And then she adjusted. She joked that she now looked like her follically challenged dad. Her parents thought she looked beautiful. And she was able to see their point.
Of course, when you look at the photograph you see her grin. She’s missing a couple of teeth, and her smile is so wide that it wrinkles her nose.
Her left arm is thrust in the air. Gia calls that her Wonder Woman pose. She is wearing a Wonder Woman armband and a Wonder Woman Tshirt. Gia calls the cat-eared headband her Wonder Woman crown.
“Wonder Woman is Gia’s thing,” Jenna says. “Every day, she would say: ‘I am brave and I am strong.’ That’s her. In some big moments, she throws her hand up and yells, ‘Yeah!’”
A couple of things you might not notice: A central catheter, commonly called a PICC line, trails behind her. It is the tube through which Gia received her chemo, her transplant and a host of medications. At the time of the photograph, Gia was still receiving fluids through her PICC line 24 hours a day.
Those shoes she’s wearing? Her first pair of high heels. She wore them on the day of her bone marrow transplant — Aug. 22, 2017. Gia and her family call that her rebirth day.
Which is why the locket she is wearing around her neck contains an August birthstone. And an inscription. A bit of Shakespeare. “A Midsummer Night’s Dream.” The inscription
says: “Though she be but little, she is fierce.” ***
Gia and her family were back at Children’s Hospital last week to have their photos taken now that she is more than a year out from her last one.
Children’s Hospital is one of 80 hospitals across the country participating in Flashes of
Hope, a nonprofit program that uses photography to bring awareness to childhood cancer.
Volunteer photographers have captured the images of roughly 75,000 kids since the program began in Cleveland in 2001. About 1,000 families have participated in the program at Children’s Hospital.
Gia arrived wearing pink sneakers, a long-sleeved teal-colored dress and gray stockings. Her hair, a bit lighter than it had been before, was growing out.
It had been 401 days since her transplant. Her blood counts looked good and she had just been given permission to stop taking her immune suppressant. Doctors would continue to monitor for the next couple of years, but Gia appears cured.
She stood in front of the photographer and threw her hand into the air.