Emmy's Story
When Emmy was five months old, her family drove down out of the mountains to Children's Hospital Colorado in Denver and the world as they knew it changed. The diagnosis was embryonal rhabdomyosarcoma, a rare, fast-growing tumor pressing against her abdomen. She began chemotherapy that same day.
What followed was two years of treatment: scans and surgeries, overnight stays and early-morning drives from the mountains to the front range, clinic visits that stretched into full days, and moments of devastating news delivered in rooms the family came to dread. Children's Hospital Colorado was the place they kept returning to. The doctors and nurses there became the people who held Emmy's care through the hardest stretch of her life. They were steady when everything else was not.
The experience also made something visible that Mike and Aja could not unsee: families navigating serious illness in a hospital system have almost no access to good food. Not for their child. Not for themselves.
"Even if you're a healthy parent treating a sick kid, you're not treating yourself well because you don't have an opportunity to live better and eat better while you're stuck in a hospital. Nothing is being offered in that world. There are something like 50 nutritionists at a children's hospital and, statistically, only 2 of them are advocates for organic care." Michael Welle, Emmy's Friends Foundation
That gap became the foundation of Emmy's Friends.
Children's Hospital Colorado has since developed the Healthy Roots Food Clinic, a program that brings free produce and nutrition education directly to families in CHCO's care. Their on-site garden grows over 1,000 pounds of food a year. In 2024 alone, the clinic served more than 1,800 adults and 1,750 children. More than 41,600 people have been reached across the program's history. It is, in concrete terms, exactly the kind of program Emmy's Friends exists to support. The place where Emmy's story began is now doing some of the most meaningful food-as-medicine work in Colorado, and that is not a coincidence we take lightly.
Emmy's treatment, in Mike's words
Mike Welle wrote from Children's Hospital Colorado at the hardest moments. These posts are part of the original archive, preserved as he wrote them.
The post that started everything. Written from CHCO on the day of Emmy's diagnosis.
Embryonal rhabdomyosarcoma confirmed. Chemotherapy begun that same day.
They found something. Mike writes from the fog of a recurrence scan and biopsy.
Food as Medicine
CHCO Healthy Roots
CHCO's Healthy Roots Food Clinic screens families for food insecurity during treatment and connects them to fresh produce, nutrition counseling, and community food resources. An on-site garden, a mobile program reaching Aurora Public Schools, and a clinical food clinic are all part of the same idea: that nourishment is part of healing.
CHCO's Healthy Roots is exactly the kind of program Emmy's Friends exists to support. If you are a family currently in CHCO's care and want to connect with additional food and wellness resources, reach out to us.