It’s back-to-school time for students all over North Texas, but for one family in South Dallas, back-to-school isn’t just a day on the calendar. It’s a miracle.<\/p>\n
“When doctors, his doctors, see him, they’re shocked at how well Neeno’s doing,” Diana Mendoza said of her 9-year-old son, Neeno.<\/p>\n
In 2022, Neeno had just celebrated his 6th birthday. He woke up with leg pain.<\/p>\n
“It was, like, hurting bad,” Neeno said. “I had to, like, keep going to the chair to go sit down.”<\/p>\n
A trip to an emergency clinic led to a trip the the ER, followed by many tests, and then news no parent wants to hear.<\/p>\n
‘His white blood cell count was very, very high,” Mendoza said. “That’s when they were like, hey, we believe he has leukemia.”<\/p>\n
But cancer wasn’t the worst of it. Ten months into Neeno’s treatment, he came down with a fungal infection that caused a stroke and blindness in his right eye.<\/p>\n
“They were giving him 3-7 days left to live,” Mendoza said. “Being that it was March when all this was happening, I was just like hey, there’s one thing I don’t want to regret; that’s not celebrating his 7th birthday.”<\/p>\n
That’s when Make-A-Wish North Texas stepped in to grant a ‘rush wish’ to throw Neeno a birthday party.<\/p>\n
“In those ‘rush wish’ situations, it’s not often that the outcome is one that we hope for; however, we call them Make-a-Wish miracles,” Make-a-Wish North Texas CEO Kim Elenez said. “They happen all the time!”<\/p>\n
“When I realized, like, oh my God! It’s like everybody came to my birthday party,” Neeno said. “I was happy!”<\/p>\n
“Everybody was there! It was a packed playroom,” Mendoza said. “And immediately you could just see his spirit lift up, you know?”<\/p>\n
Make-A-Wish North Texas’ ‘Summer of Wishes’ campaign helps make children’s wishes come true. They are hoping to grant an additional 30 wishes this summer.<\/p>\n
“So we can make more magic happen for families like Neeno and the nearly 12-hundred that are waiting right here in North Texas,” Elenez said. <\/p>\n
The Mendoza’s wish was so much more than a birthday party.<\/p>\n
“It brought hope to us that he was gonna be ok,” Mendoza said.<\/p>\n
Neeno is now more than 2 years from nearly dying. He’s learned to talk and walk and eat all over again, and this year, went back to school for the first time.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"It’s back-to-school time for students all over North Texas, but for one family in South Dallas, back-to-school isn’t…\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":165187,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5135],"tags":[5229,1596,358,3187,67,586,132,5230,68,2969],"class_list":{"0":"post-165186","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-dallas","8":"tag-america","9":"tag-dallas","10":"tag-texas","11":"tag-tx","12":"tag-united-states","13":"tag-united-states-of-america","14":"tag-unitedstates","15":"tag-unitedstatesofamerica","16":"tag-us","17":"tag-usa"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@us\/115069720087409788","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/165186","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=165186"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/165186\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/165187"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=165186"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=165186"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=165186"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}