With many businesses across the U.S. closed, a good haircut is hard to come by. But one nurse at Johns Hopkins All Children’s Hospital in Florida was able to get a pretty decent buzzcut from 14-year-old patient, Dylan Noriega.
Dylan is currently battling acute myeloid leukemia (AML), according to Hopkins All Children, and had started to lose his hair due to chemotherapy treatments. Even though his hair had started falling out, the teen didn’t want to shave his head — that is, until he made a deal with one of his nurses, Daniel Simms.
Read MoreAfter all was said and done, Dylan’s haircutting skills turned out to be pretty solid — Simms’ buzzcut doesn’t look half bad.
The buzzcut pact came about when Dylan began losing clumps of his hair after starting chemotherapy.
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“I finally asked him, ‘When are you going to shave your head?'” Simms said, according to Hopkins All Children. “His hair was coming out everywhere. He had a beautiful head of long, flowing hair. He was wearing a hair net because he wanted to hold on to it as long as he can.”
Dylan eventually decided to just do it, and shaved his own head while Simms was off work for a few days — and when the nurse returned, the teen was ready to make his barber debut. As the video shows, the chance to give his nurse and buddy a buzzcut really brightened the mood for Dylan, who can be seen smiling from ear-to-ear throughout the whole process.
“It was a selfless act that made Dylan’s condition feel a little less daunting for a little while,” Dylan’s mom Kathy said, according to Hopkins All Children. “It is hard to express how happy this made my son and me.”
What is Acute Myeloid Leukemia (AML)?
Acute myeloid leukemia is a cancer of the bone marrow. The disease causes cells in the bone marrow that would be producing red and white blood cells and platelets to die off, so eventually, bone marrow begins to fill with cancer cells. The disease is rare in children — only about 500 children in the U.S. are diagnosed with the disease every year, according to St. Jude.
In a previous conversation with SurvivorNet, Director of the Leukemia Program at Cleveland Clinic Cancer Center Dr. Mikkael Sekeres said that the bone marrow normally functions like a factory that creates all the blood cells that wind up in a person’s bloodstream.
“When a person has a cancer of the bone marrow, such as acute myeloid leukemia or myelodysplastic syndromes, that factory gets broken. These are cancers — and cancers grow and they grow in an uncontrolled way,” Dr. Sekeres said.
Dr. Mikkael Sekeres, the Director of the Leukemia Program at Cleveland Clinic Cancer Center, explains how acute myeloid leukemia (AML) works.
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