Leaning on her Love of Dance, Ella Faces a Challenging Cancer Treatment

In her 15 months as a Child Life specialist in the Infusion Center at Children’s Hospital Los Angeles, Lauren Kayser has taken on every request from CHLA’s young cancer patients to help ease their path through treatment. She has staged an air hockey competition, helped design a scavenger hunt, and once concocted a recipe for slime with different variations depending on a patient’s, well, slime preferences.

“I just meet each kid where they're at with their specific interests,” Kayser says of her work.

Considering the lengths she’s used to going, Ella’s wish to record a TikTok dance with her was an easy ask. Challenge extended—challenge accepted.

“I danced all throughout growing up,” Kayser says. “I started at age 2, and then I went into college dancing, too.”

That made for a fast connection with Ella, 13, a competitive dancer with a local dance studio. Diagnosed with a rare kidney cancer called diffuse anaplastic Wilms tumor, Ella is immersed in an intensive chemotherapy regimen. Each infusion of chemo requires accessing a port embedded beneath her skin that delivers the medication into her bloodstream. As a distraction during the procedure, Ella watches videos of her dance team she has saved on her phone.

In one instance, Kayser received the call to come to the Infusion Center to support Ella during a port access. Once the two started chatting, Ella mentioned she danced competitively.

“I immediately asked if she had any videos to show me,” Kayser says. Ella grabbed her phone, and their relationship was on.

“Dance was my whole life for 22 years,” Kayser says. “That was the center of my identity as well. It was very easy to build rapport with her. I understood where her world was.”

TikToking in the patient room

Kayser was not the first member of Ella’s care team to learn about her dancing. She wasn’t even the first to reveal that she too was a dancer.

Prior to meeting Kayser, Ella had shared her dance background with two nurses, Ashley Feldman, RN, and Kayley Ernst, RN, from the inpatient oncology unit on the hospital’s fourth floor, where she also receives treatment. Like her, they told Ella, they were competitive dancers—Feldman, a ballroom dancer since taking it up in college; Ernst, a dancer from age 6 through high school.

In their separate interactions with Ella, the two nurses would watch TikTok dances with her—until it occurred to them that they should make their own. After a couple of individual efforts—Ella with Feldman, and then Ella with Ernst—Feldman and Ernst recruited a group of their fellow oncology nurses and executed a proper TikTok, performing the “Shooting Stars” dance that was trending early in the summer.

“It was a whole thing,” Feldman says. “We were all in the room together, and we're like, ‘We got to make a window.’” Window, she explains, is dance speak for ensuring that no one is blocked from view.

They knocked the dance out in 20 minutes. “It came together pretty easily,” Ernst says. “Once we practiced once or twice, we were, like, yeah, we got this.”

Among the half-dozen nurses in the video you’ll also find a ringer—pediatric psychologist Laura Bava, PsyD, who was with Ella that day. “She was already there,” Ernst says, “so we just roped her into it.”

Beef between the units

Once Kayser heard from Ella about the fun being had on the fourth floor, she wanted in: “I was like, ‘’Let's do it!’”

She and a troupe of eager Infusion Center nurses met in Ella’s patient room, quickly learned Charli XCX’s viral Apple Dance, and shot the video wearing T-shirts emblazoned with “Team Ella.”

“Honestly, it took a lot less time than I thought it would,” Kayser says. “We did it only in two takes, which is pretty impressive, I’d say.”

The dueling TikTok dances have generated a rivalry between the two units. “4 West has beef with the Infusion Center,” Ernst says, perhaps only partly kidding.

Enjoy both groups, Feldman instructs, but let it be known that the oncology nurses were first. “We were the OGs,” she says. “Make note of that.”

Ella intends to make more videos, which might introduce two new backup dancers—her oncologists, Sara Kreimer, MD, and Brittany Van Remortel, MD, MPH. They have been approached—and tried to play down expectations.

“I said you better have one with basic choreography because I cannot promise anything,” Dr. Van Remortel says. Dr. Kreimer also is willing, if not entirely able. “I’m an awful dancer,” she says.

Beyond making treatment more tolerable, creating the dance videos keeps Ella linked to her peers, Feldman believes. “I'm sure she's feeling FOMO [fear of missing out] not being in dance with all of her friends, seeing all their competitions,” she says. “This gives her some of that back.”

The rewards are felt the opposite way, too, Feldman adds.

“She makes me want to come to work. I find a video when I'm at home, and I'm like, ‘Next time I see her, I'm going to show this to her, and maybe we can do it if there's time during the day.’ She brings out why I do this job.”

‘Believe’ and ‘Inspire’ and ‘Strength’

Ella’s dance company dedicated this season to her, titling it “Dance for Ella.” In June, at their annual recital, all the team members wore orange, the color that has come to represent kidney cancer awareness, and the opening 15-minute sequence was a tribute to her.

Ella had been admitted to the hospital with fever, so she, her father, Dr. Kreimer and several nurses watched the recital through Facebook Live.

“Even talking about it moves me to tears,” Dr. Kreimer says. “These kids were holding up signs during the dancing: ‘Believe’ and ‘Inspire’ and ‘Strength.’ And at the end, this gorgeous picture of Ella pops up on the screen. You appreciate the role she has in that community and how much she's touched their lives. Now we are an extension of that community by virtue of this experience. She’s an incredible girl.”

Her father, David, naturally agrees. He says Ella has kept her spirit throughout what will be 42 weeks of chemotherapy, in addition to multiple rounds of radiation.

“She doesn't feel sorry for herself. She doesn't ask why this happened to her. All the feelings she has every right to have, she doesn't have. It's amazing how she is handling all of this. Way better than I am.”

He recalls Ella’s first weekend in the hospital as the first indicator of the support she would get from CHLA. Ella was being cared for by Feldman and a student nurse before friends brought dinner for her and her family to have in the hospital’s cafeteria.

“After we got back to our room, the nurses were gone, but they had left a note taped to the foot of her bed. It said: ‘I am brave, I am strong, and I will get through this.’”

She has spent the past six months proving all three.