Steven Gonzalez: Beating Cancer with Video Games

When fate delivers the burden of a cancer diagnosis, it’s easy to feel fundamentally apart from others. When Texas-born Steven Gonzalez was diagnosed with Acute Myelogenous Leukemia (AML) at age 12— and was looking at a 2 percent chance of survival — the feelings that arose were complicated at best. “I really wanted to just feel normal,” Gonzalez recalls

Normal life was on hold. Gonzalez was suddenly swept up into a world of chemotherapy (at Houston’s MD Anderson Children’s Clinic), which preceded a bone marrow transplant, thirty days of hospital isolation, and one hundred days of home isolation. It was a challenge for the sixth grader to maintain his naturally positive outlook on life … except when he was playing video games. “The more I played video games, the better I felt,” he recalls. Steven felt like a kid again when immersed in an alternate reality. His games provided solace — and sparked an idea that could mean the world to fellow young people experiencing similar trials Read more...