OSCEOLA COUNTY, Fla. – Over the weekend, you may have seen pictures of several of our News 6 anchors and reporters at the “Just Call Moe Celebrity Bowl-o-Rama.”
The event raised $16,000 for Rosie’s Adventures, a nonprofit with the mission “to bring as much joy and comfort as we can to kids battling cancer in Central Florida.”
“Rosie’s Adventures” puts together care packages and events for pediatric cancer patients locally.
The organization is named after Nicole Ramirez’s daughter, Rosie, to honor her memory and support other pediatric cancer families.
“So, Rosie was such a sweet full-of-life little girl. She loved shopping and going to Disney, just like having as many fun adventures as she possibly could. And she did that even at the hospital. As soon as she got done with chemo and was out of the hospital, we would be at Target shopping. Or we would go to Disney and have fun. She didn’t want to sit at home feeling sick in bed. So she was so much fun,” Ramirez said.
Ramirez said Rosie was diagnosed with neuroblastoma when she was three years old.
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“She just all of a sudden after she turned three started getting sick a lot. And then in October of 2018, she just stopped eating. And she had bad headaches and bad stomach pains and lost a lot of weight. And I kept taking her to her pediatricians and it took about six months for them to determine they thought she had cancer,” Ramirez said. “We moved to Philadelphia for a year so she could be treated at the Children’s Hospital Philadelphia, and she did her frontline treatment there. We lived there for that. But when she relapsed, we traveled to New York City for her treatments there and we would every single month be flying to New York City for treatment for her.”
Rosie died in April 2022. Ramirez says she found comfort in continuing to buy toys Rosie loved. Just four months after Rosie died, Ramirez filed paperwork to start her foundation.
“I pretty much for three and a half years, the cancer world was all I knew. It was our world and when Rosie passed, I just couldn’t leave it. I knew what the kids went through. And I wanted to continue trying to bring joy the way I did to Rosie, to other kids battling cancer,” Ramirez said. “The moms and kids are so happy. The parents send me pictures sometimes. And they thank me, it brings them so much joy. I have one little girl who is battling the same cancer as Rosie. And every time they get to the hospital, she tells her mom, have you contacted Nikki? Have you contacted her for my care package? So, the kids look forward to it.”
News 6 Anchor Julie Broughton asked Ramirez what she wanted people to know about pediatric cancer.
“That pediatric cancer is not as rare as people think it. A lot of kids are being diagnosed and every year the numbers go up. But for some reason, the governmental funding does not go up for these children, they only get 4% of the budget for cancer research. So, it’s greatly underfunded,” she said. “One in every 260 kids in the U.S. will be diagnosed with cancer by their 20th birthday. So it’s becoming every year the stats go up of how many kids will be diagnosed in the U.S. and other countries, they’re being diagnosed very rapidly. It could be your child and whether it’s your child or not, it’s a child who deserves a childhood. They deserve a future.”
If you’d like to learn more about Rosie’s Adventures and how you can help, visit their website here.