Heartwarming story from The New York Times today (Sunday).

Fight Against Youth Cancer Enters the Recording Studio
A project founded by Anita Kruse, right, lets young cancer patients compose and record songs.

Pic from NYT shows Madison Keel in the recording studio. She was struggling to write a song.
In short order, Madison came up with a worthy subject — her dog, Suki — and standing at a microphone unfazed by a flock of musical accompanists and onlookers, sang:
“I love Suki more than the world,/She’s my little Chihuahua girl.”

To the list of weapons in fighting cancer add an unconventional one: the recording studio.
Since last year, the children’s cancer center of Baylor College of Medicine and Texas Children’s Hospital, one of the nation’s largest pediatric care facilities here in the Texas Medical Center, the world’s largest medical complex with a staff of nearly 74,000, has expanded its arts-in-medicine therapies to include songwriting and recording.

The inspiration of a Houston pianist and composer, Anita Kruse, who raised $10,000 to equip a music studio at the hospital, the project has recorded more than 85 children’s songs to date.
The songs are played on the audio tracks of Continental Airlines. Compact discs of the oeuvre, from ballads to rap, have been sent around the world, and out of it — on the space shuttle.
“The arts have therapeutic value,” said Dr. David G. Poplack, director of the cancer center, who said that getting young patients to vocalize proved particularly helpful in their recovery.
“Just treatment is not enough,” Dr. Poplack said. “We want to have a psychosocial impact so that the children are not only cured, but healed as well.” He said breakthroughs over the last 50 years had raised the survival rate of children with cancer to 75 percent from 10 percent.
Alexandra La Force Harkins, 11, is one big fan of the hospital’s music program, called Purple Songs Can Fly, a nod to Ms. Kruse’s signature color. Just a year old when doctors here discovered a tumor on her liver and removed 75 percent of the organ, Alex went through cycles of chemotherapy that seem to have left her cancer-free. But her parents have been bringing her back every year from their home in The Woodlands north of Houston for tests.

“On my ninth anniversary,” which was last year, Alex said, “a lady walked up to me and said, ‘Do you want to write a song?’ I said, ‘Cool.’”
She had never written a song, she said — except for the time she was furious at her parents for sending her to her room and composed a ditty called, “Nobody Wants Me.”
But in the recording studio, with Ms. Kruse’s help, she wrote a song called, “I Can.” With little prompting, Alex reprised a few bars a cappella:
“I can howl at the moon,/I can soar in the wind,/I can, I can.”
Last year, she said, as the family flew to Italy on vacation, they donned headsets and were amazed to catch the song playing. Now Alex has taken up the guitar but still wants to be either an artist or a veterinarian.

Ms. Kruse said she confined her role to guiding the creative process. “We try as hard as we can to have it come from the child,” she said.
For Madison, who came with her mother, Sara Keel, and stepfather, Allen Tallina, from Sour Lake, near Beaumont, for a monthly chemo treatment, Ms. Kruse and Marcia Chamberlain of a program called Writers in the Schools began by coaxing the girl to tell things about her dog, Suki.

“What does she do?” prompted Ms. Chamberlain.
Madison was mum. “Bark,” she finally said.
“What does she do to cats?” Ms. Chamberlain persisted.
“Chases them,” said Madison.
Ms. Kruse prodded, “What is something she does that is funny to you?”
“She runs in circles,” said Madison. Soon she opened up, and Ms. Kruse scribbled away.
In the studio, Ms. Kruse refined the lyric, added a chorus, and used a Mac to program a beat and instrumentalize as she picked out a melody on the keyboard. She even had a sound effect — a barking dog.
“Can you count us, Anita?” said Sandy Stewart, another songwriter who volunteers.
“Here we go,” Ms. Kruse said. “One. Two. Three.”

And Madison, reading her own words, was singing, almost inaudibly at first, then louder:

When I wake up in the morning
Suki’s there to lick my face.
When I go to bed at night
Suki’s there to kiss my toes.
She runs faster than a four-wheeler,
Quicker than a bunny.
And when she runs in circles
It’s really funny.