Key points from today’s guests:

 Breanna Robinson, Olivia’s mom

• About 10 weeks ago, her three-year-old daughter Olivia had trouble opening her right eye. She had a lot of vomiting and GI problems for about three weeks.
• At the emergency room, they diagnosed her with constipation and sent her home. But Breanna knew something wasn’t right.
• She called her pediatrician at The University of Kansas Health System and they directly admitted her for a week.
• A five centimeter tumor roughly the size of a lime was growing inside her brain and it was growing fast.
• She eventually went to Children’s Mercy for emergency brain surgery. And just last week she wrapped up six weeks of radiation treatment at The University of Kansas Cancer Center, followed by a princess party at the hospital.

Robert Robinson, Olivia’s dad

• With the shocking news of Olivia’s diagnosis, his family was supported by amazing friends and new family members.
• The staff was amazing about making Olivia feel comfortable.
• He said they went into 100 percent fight mode and once they knew that they had a plan, they put their efforts into being there for Olivia.
• Only two months into it, he said every day is a battle and they are doing whatever they can to make sure that she comes out of this stronger.
• He gave a passionate speech to the staff thanking them last week at the ring the bell ceremony, marking the end of radiation treatment.

Dr. Danielle Cunningham, radiation oncologist, The University of Kansas Cancer Center

• It's a very, very rare tumor. We see maybe 100 cases worldwide each year.
• The tumor was pushing on multiple cranial nerves in her brain, so this involved a lot of concern about Olivia’s ability to talk, her eyesight, and swallowing.
• Our goal is to provide that radiation treatment plan. That way we know we're in action mode and we can keep going.
• The goal of that plan was to use the radiation is to kill any cells left behind after the surgery and to maximally prevent things from coming back in the future.
• We actually saw some shrinkage of the existing tumor we knew about during the radiation, which was very nice to see.
• We chose to do volumetric art therapy, also known as IMRT, for Olivia, which is a fancy kind of photon radiotherapy.
• There are different types of radiation therapy and it's not a one size fits all for people. There's photon, proton, electron, and even ortho voltage radiation and it’s nice to know that you can specifically target exactly what Olivia needed.
• Chemotherapy is next for Olivia.

Dr. Dana Hawkinson, director of infection & prevention control, The University of Kansas Health System

• The hospital is at 17 active COVID infections, which is down from 24 last week.
• A new study gives confirmation that young kids saw far less respiratory problems during the first two years of the COVID 19 pandemic.
• Other studies have already proven that older masking and social distancing lowers the level of flu and RSV cases, but this new study looked even closer at young children with complex medical issues.
• What they saw was that over that two year time period, they saw a substantial decrease in the severe illness and death and they actually reported that more than 44,000 hospitalizations were saved during that two years of 2020 and 2021 with kids with severe respiratory illness due to those mitigation factors against COVID.

Tuesday, Nov. 28 at 8 a.m. is the next Morning Medical Update. Almost everything we know about sports medicine is based on male athletes. It's time for that to change.

We’ll show why women need specialized workouts and treatments.

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