Charleston, South Carolina – This week’s Everyday Hero tells the story of a brave 13-year-old Summerville boy fighting cancer for the second time, and how his mother wants to improve every child’s hospital stay.
A family suffering cancer, yet one woman still finds it in her heart and makes time to serve others in a unique way.
Rachel Kolar and her son Reece enjoy spending time together outside. Reece is 13 years old now, but Rachel saw changes in her son seven years ago.
“He was a healthy child, 5 years old, 6 years old, and suddenly he started getting sick more often,” Rachel informed me.
“I was able to go to kindergarten, but in first grade is when it started happening more frequently and a lot more symptoms started coming,” Reece says.
After multiple examinations, this family’s worst nightmare came true. Reece had brain cancer. He quickly underwent surgery to remove the tumour, but complications ensued, and Reece had to relearn how to walk and communicate.
This resulted in two years of treatment at MUSC and 56 weeks of intensive radiation followed by chemotherapy at a Florida facility.
“I took frequent naps a lot because of how the treatments were making me feel,” Reece told me.
Reece rang the doorbell in June 2019, and everything was OK until
“A biopsy was scheduled for January of 2025, and regrettably, it revealed his cancer had returned. So we started chemotherapy again in February 2025. There isn’t much hope when cancer returns. “It’s try everything because every child is worth a life,” Rachel told me.
So, while the Kolars remain positive and Reece continues to fight, his patience is clearly running out.
“It’s been long enough,” Reece remarked. “I just want to be done with it.”
Rachel noticed something was lacking after the family had spent the better part of 7 years in a hospital room.
That’s when Rachel learnt about “Once Upon A Room,” a non-profit that decorates hospital rooms for sick children across the country but not locally.
It’s all volunteer-run, and Rachel is working to raise the $10,000 needed to establish a branch in Charleston.
“I’m just hoping that our community will see the work that goes into each room and how special it makes each child feel and how important that is to their recovery,” Rachel told me.
And, take it from Reece, his room was important; it was decorated like his favourite program at the time, “Stranger Things.”
Rachel also hopes that the Charleston chapter of “Once Upon a Room” will go up on October 17.
“When your room is in more of a positive atmosphere, you’ll have a more positive mood to get out sooner,” Reece told me.
“I want to be able to bring hope and joy, and I want to take the sterile atmosphere of the hospital out so the child can get better,” Rachel told me.
She says she hopes to complete seven or eight rooms that day.
