When Alison was 12 years old, just days after Christmas in 1989, she woke up feeling “off.” There was no fever or sharp pain – just a stomach that felt hard and unfamiliar. Her mom, a nurse, rushed her to the emergency room expecting appendicitis. Instead, within hours, Alison was being sent urgently to Albany Med, surrounded by worried family members and packed bags, not fully understanding why. “It was like an out-of-body experience,” she remembers. “I just knew everyone was scared.”

Doctors quickly determined she needed surgery. A few days later, Alison heard the word ‘cancer’ for the first time. She had a rare form of Non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma and began chemotherapy within 24 hours of major surgery. At 12 years old, she didn’t grasp the full weight of the diagnosis – but she did understand when her mom told her she would lose her hair. “I’m not doing this,” Alison said. Her mom gently replied, “You don’t have a choice.”

Treatment became a relentless cycle of hospital stays, medications, and low blood counts. Alison spent her 13th birthday in the hospital, too immunocompromised to celebrate anywhere else. As the oldest patient on the pediatric unit, she became a big sister to the younger kids around her – which is why, when her oncologist introduced her to Make-A-Wish, her first reaction was that she didn’t deserve it. But her Wish Granter and now Make-A-Wish Hudson Valley’s Chief Mission Officer, Denise, reassured her that she did... that this was something meant just for her.

At the time, Alison’s family was building a new home, and for the first time she would have a bedroom of her own. So, her wish was a bedroom makeover – black and white, with touches of everything she loved, including her favorite band, New Kids on the Block.

In March 1990, her wish came true. When Alison walked into her new room, a New Kids on the Block record was already playing on her brand-new stereo. A jewelry box sat on the dresser. A camera waited for her to capture memories. Every detail had been arranged just for her.

“For a moment, it was about me just being me,” Alison says. “Not the sick kid. Not the kid running to treatment. I could just be a kid and be okay.”

That room became more than a place to sleep. It was a sanctuary – a space where she could return again and again, even on the hardest days, and feel a sense of normalcy and joy.

Alison completed treatment and closed that chapter of her life at 19, but her wish never left her. She kept the furniture for years. Today, pieces of that bedroom continue to live on with family and friends – her white bed frame now belongs to her niece, her dresser is used by a friend’s children, and Alison still holds onto the original sheet sets. The wish quite literally grew with her, becoming part of other childhoods along the way.

Now 49, Alison leads a fulfilling life with her husband, two step children and her beloved dog. While she has faced a few health scares over the years, she is doing well and continues to carry the strength she found as a wish kid. For her 25th cancer-free anniversary, she even conquered her fear of heights and skydived out of a plane to support another Make-A-Wish chapter’s ‘Wish Jump’ fundraiser – a powerful testament to the courage and desire to give back that a wish can inspire.