Mary Kate Kroesch, 15, finished her seventh round of chemo this week and she’s still got more to go.
She said she couldn’t have done it without space for her to practice music.
“My first day of high school, I was in the hospital talking about chemo and radiation,” Kroesch said.
She has CIC-Rearranged sarcoma. Immediately upon diagnosis, her family packed their car in Illinois and drove to the MD Anderson Cancer Center in the Texas Medical Center.
They said the Houston facility was willing to treat her rare kind of cancer. Despite not having a place to stay, they showed up to the medical center 15 hours later. Soon, they found Ronald McDonald House Charities of Greater Houston.
It was just what her family needed, and Mary Kate fell in love with the music room available to patients.
“This room helps me, like, get away from the stress of treatments and it helps me stay connected with my high school by allowing me to practice music and practice my audition for my high school spring musical,” Mary Kate explained. “Auditions are in the middle of January and so I’m preparing a video for that. Unfortunately, I’m still going to be here for the audition dates. So, I am going to have a either a video that I’m going to send in or on the date I am going to have a Zoom meeting.”
Ana Trevino and Jonathan Godfrey from the Prelude Music Foundation often teach music to kids staying at the Ronald McDonald House because, they say, music is healing.
“When you make music, our body releases oxytocin and dopamine and serotonin so that we feel better and the research suggests that after making music, actually that that stays in our system for 27-ish minutes,” Jonathan Godfrey explained.
“That’s when the body really releases these neurotransmitters and hormones that really help us connect and bond to ourselves, to our community and... even negate pain,” Ana Trevino Godfrey said. “One of our favorite things to observe and witness is the face of a parent. During music class. The children forget what they’re going through. You see pure joy. You see them feeling the beat, you see them singing, and you see this moment that’s created from music and from everybody being really entrained to the music, feeling the beat together.”
CEO of Ronald McDonald House Charities Greater Houston, Cristina Vetrano, says that’s why they have the music room and additional services.
“They’re going to find ways to soothe and just work through their emotions in lots of different ways and so we try to have a lot of options for that. So, a music room is super important. We also have an art room. We do activities for the families, one or two activities a day throughout the year. Anything that we feel can be the right connection. We’ve had Zumba classes here before. Everyone can find a way that they get some sort of relief from the really difficult days that our families are managing every day,” Vetrano said.
All of the services, in addition to the housing, is free of charge. So families can focus on kids getting better and kids can focus on the things that matter most to them.
“Like just having a space to sing has been such a huge help,” Mary Kate said. “This just gives me a place to go to another world.”
Support Ronald McDonald House Charities of Greater Houston to provide families like Mary Kate’s with free housing, meals, and healing spaces during their toughest times.
