When Stacy Coleman told her seven-year-old son Atlas he was selected to the 2024 Kid Captain roster, there was a celebration complete with “pure joy” and a victory dance.
“There’s not a lot of fun stuff when you have cancer, so it was really nice to have something that was so exciting for him,” Coleman said.
Last fall, Atlas and his parents attended an Iowa football game at Kinnick Stadium, where they saw the Kid Captain celebration from the stands. On Saturday, Atlas and his parents will have a full-circle experience as they take the turf.
“When we pointed the Kid Captain out to Atlas last year, he said, ‘I want to do that,’” Atlas’ father Neal recalled. “So here we are.”
Atlas said he is looking forward to everything on Saturday, but mostly seeing the players.
Kid Captains have the opportunity to meet the Hawkeye football team during its annual Kids’ Day at Kinnick. During the open practice, the team signs autographs for the kids, takes photos, and gives the honorary captains exclusive behind-the-scenes experiences.
Atlas looks up to the players as a young athlete himself.
“I play football at recess,” Atlas said. “QB.”
In his free time, he also enjoys playing his favorite sport, hockey.
But the road to becoming a healthy, sports-loving kid wasn’t easy, and it all started by coincidence.
At about 15 months old, Atlas was taken to the emergency room. The hospital staff suggested chest X-rays to investigate Stacy and Neal’s initial concerns. The tests showed clear results for the Colemans’ prior concern but created a new one instead.
“They did find what we thought was a benign cyst in his lung,” Stacy said. “It’s a cyst some kids are just born with.”
Local doctors suggested removal, but the Coleman family opted for a second opinion from the University of Iowa Health Care Stead Family Children’s Hospital.
“When we met with the surgeon there, they made us feel super comfortable,” Stacy recalled.
Confident this was the right path to recovery, the Colemans went through with the procedure and had Atlas’ lower-left lobe of his lung removed. Typically, this would require a few days of recovery in the hospital, but a routine biopsy found pleuropulmonary blastoma, a rare fast-growing cancer, in Atlas’ lung tissue.
“It was right before the holidays,” Neal said. “We thought it would be a regular Christmastime.”
A few weeks later, Atlas underwent another surgery to get a chemotherapy port in his chest. Then began six months of chemotherapy treatment.
The family would go in once a week for different types of treatment. Sometimes, Atlas would be required to stay overnight.
The treatment process proved successful, as Atlas has remained cancer-free for six years.
However, Atlas was also diagnosed with the DICER1 genetic mutation, meaning he is vulnerable to developing other types of cancer throughout his life. To monitor this, Atlas follows a surveillance plan curated by his care team at the Stead Family Children’s Hospital.
Atlas said each surveillance appointment begins the same — by looking in the fish tank on the hospital’s first floor.
“We always start downstairs for the imaging, so we check out the fish to see who is new,” Stacy said.
The care team completes a variety of tests, X-rays, and scans to ensure Atlas is cancer-free.
Atlas will walk onto Duke Slater Field with his cancer six years in remission, waving to kids going through their own journeys.
Stacy says she gets goosebumps just thinking about the Wave tradition.
“It’s amazing to see everyone having so much love and sending it over to those kids who really need it.”