13-Year-Old Cancer Patient Finishes Walking a Marathon on Final Day of Chemo

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He completed 629 laps around the nurses’ station during his treatment. ❤️

Every day, Joey Belles got his laps in around the nurses’ station., a rare brain tumor that required surgery and intensive chemotherapy, in June 2019, and he had been in the hospital for much of the time since then. His doctors and physical therapists at Cook Children’s Medical Center in Fort Worth, Texas, acknowledged how easy it was to just turn off the light each day and rest, but they encouraged him to at least stand up every day, and even move a bit if he could.

“We realized, as the physical therapy team, that patients weren’t active on their own a lot. They were staying in their rooms,” Lydia Robey, D.P.T., who helped start the Miles in Motion program, told. “We needed a culture change where people saw exercise as medicine, so we incentivized things like walking. We gave patients tracking sheets and said 24 laps around the station is a mile, see what you can do.

Those few laps at a time turned into five, then 10, 20, and eventually as many as 32 at a time. The sheet that Joey used to keep track of his laps just kept growing, and before he or the nurses realized it, he was on the verge of hitting a marathon distance in total.

 

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