Matthew J. MacVeigh

Sophomore Recognized for Giving Spirit

Hailey Hodgkiss, sophomore at Irving High School and the youngest of seven siblings, is a student accustomed to giving life her all. But it was two weeks following her 14^th  birthday that ALL was out to get her. Hodgkiss was diagnosed with Acute Lymphoblastic Leukemia, commonly referred to as ALL, a fast-growing cancer of the white blood cells. The disease appears most often in children younger than age 10 and is the most common leukemia in children.

“I was in the hospital a lot – six to nine months out of the year,” Hodgkiss said of her stays at Children’s Medical Center of Dallas. She said a church group often visited her floor of the hospital, bringing gift packages of “fun things” to the children undergoing treatment. Hodgkiss said she very much appreciated the gift, but because ALL mostly affects younger children there were not many items in the package for teens.

Her cancer is currently in remission and she has been off of treatment for two months, giving Hodgkiss the opportunity to help other teens faced with ALL. In September, she delivered her first set of gift bags to teens undergoing treatment at Children’s Medical. Hodgkiss said that initially she had planned on taking the gifts to patients on her own. Quickly overcome with emotion at seeing others battling the same illness, she asked hospital care givers to help her with the rest. Since the first bags in September, Hodgkiss said she has tried to include “cooler stuff” in the packages. She gave out .mp3 players in the most recent set of gift bags and would eventually like to be able to give out laptop computers so that teens could work on school assignments while in the hospital. She has mailed out requests for donations to family and friends, and was surprised to receive funds from people she had not initially contacted.

“She started getting checks from Hawaii, Guam, Idaho…all these people she had no idea who they were,” Leslie Hodgkiss, Hailey’s mother, said. “I think it touched people’s heart that she has ‘been there’, knows what its like, and that she wants to make it a little bit better for some other teenagers there at Children’s.”

Hodgkiss’s philanthropic efforts were recognized February 13 when she was awarded The Spirit of Tom Landry Character Award. The award “recognizes a youth with courage, integrity, dignity and dauntless spirit who has battled blood cancer through personal experience or who has volunteered extensively on behalf of others who suffer from blood cancer.” The award is given annually by Mrs. Tom Landry, who lost her husband to a type of blood cancer, and it was presented during The 25th Anniversary Saint Valentine’s Day Luncheon & Fashion Show benefiting The Leukemia & Lymphoma Society.

In addition to giving of time and efforts for teens diagnosed with ALL, Hodgkiss is a very involved member of her church, Irving High student council, and enjoys participating in theater. She also said she enjoys reading, scrapbooking and spending time with her family. Scheduled to graduate high school early following her junior year, she hopes to attend Brigham Young University to pursue a nursing degree. Eventually, Hodgkiss said, she would like to attend medical school and become a pediatric oncologist, the type of doctor that treats children and teens with blood diseases and cancer.