WINDHAM — Two-year-old Rylee Simmons is an active Jimmy Fund hero.
The precocious girl, diagnosed with leukemia in January, starts treatments showing the nurse or doctor where to place a tube or listen to her heart by demonstrating on her stuffed monkey.
On Sept. 12, she and other Boston Marathon Jimmy Fund Walk heroes will mark the route for 8,000 walkers over its 26.2 miles.
Their photographs will be posted as mile markers while the walkers try to raise $6.5 million for cancer care and research at Dana-Farber Cancer Institute.
Rylee has received care at both the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute and Children's Hospital in Boston since January, and has been cancer-free since the end of February. She was diagnosed with acute lymphoblastic leukemia after her parents — Jon, 37, and Melissa, 35 — noticed she had a fever, flu-like symptoms and a rash.
Rylee spent two months at Children's Hospital. She had successful lung surgery. She travels to Dana-Farber every three weeks for chemotherapy and steroids.
If the toddler stays free of cancer for two years, she will be considered cured and would only return to the hospital periodically for tests.
Jon Simmons said doctors told him and his wife the cure rate for the kind of cancer Rylee has is 80 percent to 85 percent.
Rylee is involved in her care. Before a nurse inserts a tube and needle into the port that leads to her heart, she insists upon cleaning the attached cap. She swabs it with alcohol before medicine is injected.
She also helps her mother make Rylee bracelets by threading beads. They are on sale at stores around town and online to help the family pay Rylee's medical bills.
In general, Rylee is tidy and deliberate, her parents said. On Monday, sporting her new blue Jimmy Fund hero T-shirt, she had to make sure her father's desk chair was pushed under the desk after he got up.
Rylee then proceeded to make sure that each clasp was buckled on her nearby booster chair. The little girl has grown up a lot in the past eight months, her parents said. She insists on drinking and eating from adult glasses, plates and utensils. No sippy cup for Rylee.
She celebrates the end of each treatment session — and just about anything else — with a few Doritos chips.
"She's very articulate," her father said. "She's been talking since she was 1."
Her parents encourage her to be involved and engaged in everything she does, including her care.
"If she knows what is happening, she'll be less afraid," Melissa Simmons said.
That might be why her parents are so committed to improving cancer care and the Jimmy Fund benefit.
They recognize Rylee might not directly benefit from money raised this year, but she has benefited from previous money raised and this year's funds "might help another kid," Melissa Simmons said.
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