Childhood Cancer and Laughter… With Cody Adams from WISH-TV Indianapolis

Our special guest today is Cody Adams, an anchor at Wish TV in Indianapolis, Indiana. He hosts two shows on Wish TV: "Lifestyle Live," a nationally syndicated television program, and the "All Indiana" program, an infotainment show focusing on stories and happenings in Central Indiana. I had the privilege of being on his show a while back. Cody, welcome to "Cancer Comedy."

Thank you for having me, Brad. I appreciate it. It's nice to be on this side of things. Usually, I'm the one hammering people with questions, so it's fun to be on the other side.

It is fun, and we get to do it here on a podcast, a little more than four-minute segments. You're a TV guy, Cody, and it seems like you really love it. Tell me how you feel about it.

It's one of my favorite things.

Yeah, you're part of TV. You're on the air a lot here. I'm not sure how often, but it seems like every time I turn on the television locally, there you are.

That's a good thing for us. We like to keep it that way.

But, you know, one of the things I find interesting about television is that certain programs stick with you. They really do. For instance, I recently hosted a comedy event, and one of the characters played a Barney Fife character from the old Andy Griffith Show. It goes back a bit, shows my age and my era a little. But I'm curious, Cody, as a TV guy, tell me about a television show or character that just made you laugh or really resonated with you.

One of my favorite shows of all time is Modern Family. Phil Dunphy, that character, absolutely crushes me every single time. My wife, family, and I have rewatched that show probably four or five times. Something about his genuine humor and the way he loves his family, even though it's a character, adds another layer of hilarity. He's constantly trying to appease them, and hilarity ensues from that.

Yeah, he's also got that little naivete. A bit of Hyper Energy. Sometimes it's appropriate. That's good. I love to talk about television and things, pop culture things that impact us. Because that's a part of our psyche, part of who we are, what we are about. But tell me a bit about how you got into TV and how this became a part of a career track for you.

So, I'm a radio guy originally. I love radio. If it was there monetarily, that's where I would like to be, in the realm of radio. It allows those big conversations. You can continue to talk, have a bit more room. I initially started in sports, play-by-play, color commentary. I was at Indiana State University, from Indiana, born and raised in Roachdale, a town of 800, one flashing stop, you know, all that. When I was in school, ISU didn't have a communications program. I was in electronic media, way back before we used our phones for everything. Now we shoot every story, there's probably cell phone footage in everything we do. That wasn't the case when I was first coming up. A professor said, "You need to learn how to use this because this is going to be it." The major turned into using podcasts, social media, everything to create one cohesive entertainment and media platform. While editing the essay, I started working for local TV stations. I grew up watching those people in Terre Haute with family. Started out in sports. A news director wisely came to me and said, "I know you love sports, but I think you should try doing news." I said, "No, I don't want to be around the doom and the gloom." I was sure I was going to be on ESPN, big desk in Connecticut, hosting with Scott Van Pelt. She said, "That's not happening." That was the first moment in my career where someone truthfully spoke and said, "You got a lot of talent, but it's not there." She said, "I want you to try news." I pushed back. She said, "Honestly, you don't have a choice. I make the schedule, you're doing it." I filled in anchoring on weekends, a new position opening up. She loved sports guys doing news for the ability to ad lib and have a conversation. The first show was totally different from sports, new stuff every time. You had to change the way you read when a story was sad or when you felt empathy. It was kind of fun. I ended up getting that job in Terre Haute, thought I was going to be there forever. Fate had it differently. I moved to Texas for a main anchoring gig, then to Lexington, did mornings. In Lexington, I thought I'd be there forever, but things went downhill during COVID. We needed a change, get back home to family. I looked at which TV, never thought it'd be a possibility. Reached out to the news director, got a call the next day, came in for an interview, called in sick at my last job, you got to do what you got to do. When I got here, it's been two years, a whirlwind. Started as a reporter, moved to anchoring weekends, mornings, and now hosting a nationally syndicated lifestyle show. It's been absolutely insane, and I've loved every second of it. That's what makes it easy to come in each day.

That's cool. If you love something, it makes it easy to come in, time goes by quickly. There's a certain energy and vibrancy to it. It seems like you even like the people you work with, the vibe I see around here, at least.

That's the best part of this job, coming in and knowing I've got people here who have my back. I've got their back. I genuinely enjoy laughing with them. The sports department, we play Family Feud every day at 3:21. I go in there, we do fast money. I think that helps.

That's great. When you have joy in your life, it makes a big difference, especially with challenging things that come along. It sounds like you really enjoy that and enjoy telling stories too, don't you?

I love it. That's my favorite part.

What makes a good story?

The people, a person makes a good story, right? It doesn't have to be the most amazing story you've ever heard, but each person has their own story, years of experience in some cases. Those little things make our stories.

Sure. And you've got your own story as well. Tell me about your family because that's another important aspect.

Yeah, the most important for sure. I met my beautiful wife, Nicole, at Indiana State University. Then we got married quickly because I knew that was the best I was doing. Nothing better than that. I wanted to make sure she didn't figure it out before.

You say you married up.

Oh man, I'm married way up, my sense. Then we had our first beautiful child shortly after that, Madeline. The feeling of having a child is so insane. It doesn't make sense that you could love something as much as we love her. Had another daughter shortly after that. But my first daughter was born with a rare form of leukemia.

Well, let's go there for a second because it sounds like things were, in many ways, you've had a blessed life, which you've shared. So you've had some really good job opportunities. Not everybody has those same opportunities. You've had your ups and downs, to be sure, but you've had good job opportunities, married up, two daughters. And then you mentioned here how you had some challenges. Tell me the story about what happened with your first daughter.

So here's the wild part, Brad, not to go way back. But when I was 23 years old, both my parents died that same summer, three months apart. My mother passed away from breast cancer, my father from drug addiction. Just a really difficult time. I looked at my wife and said, Listen, now's the time. I need a family. We've got to do this. When we found out we were pregnant with Maddie, everything was on the up and up. This is exactly what we've waited for, a beautiful daughter coming our way. Things were fantastic for the first three months. We were so happy. But my wife, God bless her, so smart, just kept saying, something's not right here. So we took her to the pediatrician. Regular visits, the doctor felt around her abdomen area. His face turned ghost white. He said, there's a mass here. This needs to be checked out. We're sending you to Peyton Manning Children's Hospital. Get blood work done, have things taken care of. You don't know what's going on at all. Your first time dealing with cancer is a mess. It's not usually a good thing. It gets your attention. Exactly. Yeah. We do the blood work, Maddie is laid down for bed, we're watching Seinfeld. We get a call from the doctor, he says, you need to go to Peyton Manning right now. It's a whirlwind from that point. My wife and I were hysterical, freaking out. We don't know what's going on, frustrated. We're very faithful people, God is a massive part of our lives. I remember being so angry that God would take something away, like my parents, provide me something happy, like a daughter, and then challenge me in this. Ticked isn't the word I was using. I was so angry. The doctor walks in to get all the papers, Maddie is sitting there, happy. She doesn't know what's going on, obviously, she was only four months old at the time. The doctor says, I need you guys to sit down with me. The blood work shows that Maddie has leukemia. I kid you not, Brad, in that exact moment, I had never heard my daughter laugh. She cackled, the largest cackle I've ever heard. I just remember, "Let me get this straight." At that moment, simultaneously, the doctor said, Maddie has leukemia, and Maddie, as a four-month-old baby, laughed hysterically. I don't know why.

It couldn't be misconstrued as like a bubble or a bourbon or anything.

It was a full-on laugh, which then turned into my wife and I laughing through tears. My father-in-law laughing through tears. The doctor confused as all get out as to why we're all laughing. Then it was just months of not as much laughter, sure, but that moment we still cling to that moment.

It felt like they kind of set the tone in a way for the trials that were ahead.

Yeah, it was that moment of deeply knowing things were going to be okay, even though there were moments of, "Is this going to be okay?"

But describe for me kind of what was going through. You said you were ticked and mad on one level, and your daughter laughed. But to put your reporter's hat on for a second. What was it like? What was the vibe, what was the smells, the colors around you? Set the scene for me when this happened.

It was so cold in there. I'll never forget how cold it was. Part of that was it was November anyway, so it was going to be cold. I remember it being very cold. It smelled like any hospital, and I hate hospitals. My mom was in them all the time battling cancer. My youngest brother is mentally handicapped. We were always in the hospital for things with him. So they're already icky to me. Peyton Manning Children's Hospital, one of my favorite places on planet Earth, simply because they've really tried to pull that away, you know, and they try to make that a little bit easier on you, at least. But I remember feeling trapped because we went from, "You need to go to the hospital," to, "You are now staying at the hospital because we got to figure this out." So that decision was made right then. They got her a room, put us in a room, and said, "You're going to be here for, we don't know how long," because there was a lot of stuff that needs to be done. They couldn't tell what form of leukemia it was in the moment. Turns out it was a rare form called JMML, which has some long meaning, and I don't know, but it's intimidating. All those things are intimidating. Yes. So intimidating. We get to the hospital room, they get Maddie kind of comfortable. They start putting in the PICC line for her in her arm because they know they're going to be drawing a lot of blood, and all that, and it makes it easier than having to prick them every time. My wife and I just sitting in there on those cold plastic beds, just crying, just, you know, what is next, and why are we doing this?

Those big needles and little babies.

And that was the hardest part. We didn't stay at Peyton Manning because when they found out it was JMML, they said you have to get a bone marrow transplant. That's the only way to take care of this. Then we'll do them at Peyton, and they don't do bone marrow transplants, so they said you're on to Riley. Boy, was that a genuinely life-saving move. Just such a great thing to happen because we met some lifelong friends through that, and family. We call them family. This is one of my favorite stories. When it's your child, there's a lot of information to process. Okay, what's it going to do to my child? It's like a booklet, and it's basically their opportunity, the doctors, to say, here are all the things that go right, and here are all the things that go wrong.

The heaviness of that. Isn't it just so dang heavy?

Doctors, God loved them. They do amazing work. They're not typically comedians or great talkers. So it is over and over, and you're like, Dude, I need you to get through this. Let's speed it up. And our nurse practitioner, Paula Towle, one of the coolest characters you'll ever meet in your life, because she comes in, plops herself down on the middle of the floor, just sits down, and I'm thinking, What the heck is this woman doing right now in the middle of this? Turns out she was the biggest blessing in the world to us. A beloved family member now, the girls stay there all the time at her house, but because she's personable, exactly. That's part of the healing process. Yeah, yeah. The bone marrow transplant is a process in and of itself because you have to figure it out. You have to find a match, do all of that. You don't know if you're going. One thing we had that we knew was our faith. We prayed a lot daily, multiple times a day, hourly, dependent upon what was going on. So they do a bone marrow aspiration, essentially a massive needle into your hip bone, pull out some bone marrow to test what situation you have going on.

Got him with a little baby. Oh my gosh, did you guys have to, like, hold her while she, so you physically hold her when she had done?

My wife couldn't be a part of that. It was too much. To her credit, she was there every single day, seeing everything. I was going back and forth from work, working at the TV station where I ended up going into news anchoring. So I was driving back and forth from that. I remember showing up, and she's like, "I can't. I need you to take her." Because we had to take her to another room where they were then going to give her medicine to put her to sleep to be able to do this. They're just going to sleep, you're just getting them anesthesia. But it looks like she is just going lifeless, right? And Liz and all that. Yeah, it's mind-boggling. You're holding her, and you just said you're holding her, right? Yeah. So then I lay her down, and I walk out because I can't watch them shove a massive needle into her hip. I don't like getting my flu shot, let alone watching it happen to my daughter. So, need to find a match for that. There's a great organization called Be The Match worldwide, and they literally swab people daily. You could go to Be The Match right now. They would send you a swab kit. You can get on the registry to be able to be a donor if you were ever a match for someone. We were so blessed to find a perfect 10 out of 10 match. Found three of them. Oh my goodness. Then it's like this weird anticlimactic moment because this is all happening over months. But it feels like a whirlwind, you know? Today's the day for the bone marrow transplant, and they walk in with this little dinky, like, four-inch bag of blood, and they go, "All right, lay her down. We're going to put it in her PICC line." Then you sit there for hours while it slowly drips. Before all of that, though, there was a week of intense chemotherapy, having watched my mother go through chemotherapy several times.

So you had this history going on? Yeah, you've seen your demise, your mother, and you can't help but project this on your daughter, right?

Absolutely, immediately. I remember watching my mom go through that, getting sick and not wanting to eat. So I kind of had an understanding of what my daughter might be going through. When you brush a baby's hair and watch that hair come out on the brush, that's a moment that you wake up in cold sweats 10 years later. Of course, I took a picture of it. I'm a journalist, right? I documented everything. I love seeing that picture because I remember immediately the feeling that I had, like nothing else matters. I love my job. It doesn't matter. The only thing that mattered in that moment was her and making sure she was going to get to live a happy.

Let's talk about her, your daughter, Maggie. How did she, even as an infant, as a little girl, help you and your wife and anybody else in your family navigate all this, or did she? Is she an infant?

Yeah. I mean, that's one of the things that surprise people. I talk about this too. You'll learn a lot from a baby going through cancer, right? They cry for the same reasons they would cry if they were not having cancer. It makes day in and day out operations in your life seem very small. If you notice an infant battling for their life, who cares if I get a flat tire? Is that the worst thing that can happen in my life? It's perspective, right? Yeah, it's all about perspective. I remember just thinking, how is this person, who has no understanding of life, already so insanely strong? She doesn't know what she's living for. She has no reason, honestly, at this point to live. I mean, why would she? But she still fought.

Because your understanding of awareness may be different than hers, and yet there is a sense of an awareness that something profound has happened.

Absolutely. Watching her do that was just a mind-boggling experience.

The experience that you had has changed your life profoundly. Correct? So let's changes everything and how you do life yourself and your marriage and your parenting of both your daughters and how you serve others in your job. Let's talk for a few minutes, Cody, about how the lessons you learned from that laughter of Maddie carries you through to what you're doing now. And how there may be some things that we can share with others. What are some actions that you took that may be transferable to other folks?

Focusing on your child, and that's part of parenthood anyway, right? Like, you have a new child, every holiday, whatever is like, oh, where's the baby? You don't ever think about yourself. You got to take a minute to think about yourself through that because you don't realize how exhausted you are. I passed down an elevator during that whole process. I didn't realize that and eaten in two days because you're so focused on other things. My wife and I, and this is simply because we had amazing nurses, they would be very adamant about you need to go for a walk when you go get some dinner, just the two of you. And we had probably more dates in the time that my daughter was in the hospital than we had in those three months before she was in the hospital. So I remember we were able to reconnect on a different level where now we both were fighting for the same thing. And our marriage, while important, wasn't the most important thing in that moment. We were able to figure that out that there was more to this world than just me and her. So I think that a big, big thing you can do and need to do is really just take a second and say, How am I feeling right now?

A couple of days, your self-care—self-care for sure, relationship care, or marriage or relationship.

It's like an asinine number. I think it's like over 50% of marriages end in divorce, and you're talking childhood cancer.

That's where I was gonna go with this. The cancer is devastating not only to your physical health but it impacts so many other people. Yeah, and it can impact things to the negative. Now, divorce is one of those things, and understandably so. Yeah. Oh, it's crushing, crushing if you let it. That's why you've got to be active and take action to crush it. Well, I like to look at it too. We like to say turn the grammar to agree on, you know, try to take this grim thing and switch it around with your attitude and things like that. So, that type of thing.

Routines are huge. Yeah, have a routine because it's really easy to get out of that routine when you're living in a hospital room like my wife was. I mean, it's real simple to not know what time of day it is. You don't know when your show that usually watches coming to all those things.

Or you're out of your, you're in a bubble. You're now you're in a bubble.

Quite literally. I mean, you know, for her, she had immunodeficiency. Yeah, because you got those actual bubbles, she was in a HEPA room. So they essentially filter the air. But same concept.

Same idea. Yeah. Let's talk for a minute about another aspect here that I think is important for people who really want to, if people really want to get through this. So that's where we're going with this. Cody, how can we, you and I, in our conversation here be helpful to that couple going through this similar thing? But how was a connection to a higher power, spiritual life, or any aspect along this? What role did it play, if any, in getting through this and coping?

Comfort. It was simply knowing that in the end, if you truly believe what you've been taught over life or whatever, is that it's going to work out. In the end, you don't know how, you don't know what that looks like. But you know that God is in control of that, right? And so, if you believe that God's will is really at hand here and what you're following, whether she makes it through it or not, that's part of the plan. And sometimes the plan sucks, you know it, at least initially. I certainly thought that was the case when both my parents passed away, right? Like your plan sucks. Like, what's the deal here? Well, then I find out I'm gonna have a daughter, right? And that's part of the plan, and then you find out your daughter's sick. Well, that sucks. Yeah. But then your marriage is reignited. And you start to realize, oh, there's something here we're now becoming a family, and this is the most important thing, and now you have a second daughter, and now you enjoy every single day that you see that child wake up because you spent months not knowing if they're going to.

So that's the cherish. And that, you know, I believe when you talk about words like cherish and that type of thing, there is a spiritual aspect with that spiritual vibe that comes into play. I call it the vertical and the horizontal, the, you know, the vertical is between us and God and the horizontal between us and one another. And that works best when you have that flow of spiritual energy that goes both up and down, up and to others, as it were. And so I'd like to think strategically for a second what changed, or what are some of the habits or principles or practices that changed for either for you personally, or as a family or, you know, first, so people journal, you know, a big part of what they do is to integrate some of these things we've already talked about, but tell me how life changed for you and your family.

So it's gone through a lot of different changes. Because when you get through that you have a lot of PTSD, and legitimate PTSD, you smell something and it takes you right back there, you get real sick to your stomach, and you start to get real sad and all of that. And then maybe you hear something that kind of makes you smile a bit and think about a happy moment through that. And so really navigating that immediate after is our thing, also, one of the things that isn't talked about enough. And I tell parents, I've been fortunate in this platform to get to talk to a lot of people going through similar things. It's okay to be ticked off at the people around you a little bit, because you'll find out that they're there in the moment, and you're so grateful for that support. For them. There's an endpoint, right? When they get the all clear, oh, your daughter's healthy, they go, Oh, great, our job is done. We were there for them through that hard time. There's a lot of hard times after that navigating that and those people are there if you call on him, but they're not there at your door with that casserole or whatever. And, and navigating that is really hard. You feel this loneliness, because for so long, you've had all these people surrounding you, you start to take each day a little bit more seriously. And you start to really focus on like, what makes you happy? And what makes Maddie happy? What makes Ella happy? Because you don't know that you're going to get those days to enjoy that happiness. We didn't. I mean, when we had Ella we were first-time parents again. Because we didn't have a real-time parenthood experience.

You had that major crisis intervention and situation.

Simple things. Like I always tell the story teething, Maddie started teething, she was on morphine. She didn't go through. She was on a full-on morphine drip to go and there's a role she didn't do the TV. The withdrawal was strange when she, you know, got addicted to it because they've given her morphine every whatever, you know, two hours, or whatever it was. So that was strange. But when Ella started teething, I'm like, Man, this is annoying, as Maddie didn't cry at all. So little things like that, like it's okay that, that life was strange for one child. And if you have a second child, it's even stranger because you've never done that. You know, those sorts of things.

Every experience in life is a learning experience. What you do with it matters because people can be devastated and crushed by it, or they can build upon it and do something out of the pain to pursue something of value and serve others. So, that's where I like to take this. How do you think you can serve other people with love? Out of this painful experience, what are you doing that is helpful here, that you think is helpful to others and serving them?

First and foremost, I gotta give credit to my wife. I've talked about how great she is. She's the smartest person I know. She's on speed dial for many doctors and nurses. When it comes to, "Hey, we got a parent who's going through this, they've got an eight-month-old who now has leukemia, we just talked to them. Just let them know your thoughts."

So, you know, some sort of a networker, or your wife is sort of a networker.

And she was because, again, I'm a journalist, and she's a social media guru. We documented a lot of this, and Mandy's story got out there to a lot of people because it was happening while I was working in Terre Haute. I did a lot of stories on her. People were constantly asking. I still get emails here in Indianapolis. When I lived in Texas, I would get emails from viewers in Terre Haute saying, "Hey, how's your daughter doing? How did things turn out?" Because they wanted to follow that. So because of that, people reach out, "Hey, I was Googling this. I saw your daughter went through this. What do I need to know?" And there are things you don't realize you need to know. Simple things, like we were talking about, like, "Go get lunch. Your daughter is going to be okay." She's hooked up to a bunch of wires. She's not going anywhere. There are nurses there 24/7. It's okay to walk and get a pizza. Because you feel this guilt, right? You don't want to leave the bedside. What if something happens? Guess what? If something happens, they're probably going to let you know. For me, I get this platform working here. I do a lot of stories, whether it's with Riley, Peyton Manning, and I've met a lot of parents who I remember the moment they're in. I remember going through that, and it's so nice to be able to sit down and tell them it's going to be okay. Because I'm proof, and my daughter's proof. I can't promise, obviously. I'm not Nostradamus. I'm not a doctor. I'm sure not all-knowing. But I can promise you that you will get through it in some capacity.

You've got the privilege of a platform here, don't you? The idea, Cody, is to take advantage of your platform to give you purpose. Moving forward, I use podcasting in my ministry as a platform for what I like to share. It seems like you've been able to leverage that and you've been given the opportunity to do that. Tell me a story about how that platform has allowed you to do something cool or deal with something that you saw made a difference beyond your own little experience.

Almost immediately when I got here, we do these things called inside stories. They're big, long-form five, six-piece stories. I did one on childhood cancer, met with the leukemia, lymphoma society, talked with them about ways they're constantly trying to get funding. Funding is the biggest issue right now in cancer research, specifically in children. Only 4% of government funding goes to childhood cancer research, which seems crazy. Also, when you learn that children are going through the same chemotherapy that you and I would go through, that's even crazier. How is a four-month-old child getting the same chemo that a 34-year-old man could get? That doesn't seem to make sense. Why aren't we figuring out ways to change that? Being able to do a big five-part series and share the stories of another young teenage girl who just beat cancer a second time. 17 years old, she's had cancer twice. You start to look at your story and go, "Boy, that's not nearly as bad as what she's going through." One time with cancer seems pretty easy compared to two times. You get to share stories of people who otherwise wouldn't get to share their story. Then you get to understand those people and know them. Then you get to watch her go off to college. Now she's going to be a nurse, and I just love that aspect of it. I love that there are people battling everyday life that you and I don't know, and I get to share those stories with the community. Maybe it helps. Maybe somebody gets a donation, maybe somebody gets that gas card they need to get to the hospital. I don't know.

I call them the lifter-uppers. That's the name I'd like to call the followers of my shoulder lifter-upper because those things lift you up. Tell me a story about absurdity or something that made you laugh.

So this is a pseudo-sad one but also a very happy one. When Maddie was on trial and on a study because of this form of cancer that she has. When she was first going through chemotherapy, they were doing a trial and a study to find out which type of chemotherapy would be best. So there was an A arm and a B arm of chemotherapy. One was more intense; the A arm was going to be way more intense than the B arm, and they were trying to see if this B arm was going to work. So they had like 10 kids on this study. Ten of them were going to get the A arm, and 10 were going to get the B arm. We were thinking, "Mandy's got to get the B arm because we want that lesser chemotherapy. It's going to be so nice. We don't have to go through the hard stuff." She didn't get it. She got on the A arm, and we're like, "The worst thing ever." We thought it's the end all be all, and come to find out, the other arm didn't work at all. None of those kids made it, which is awful. But we're literally a coin flip away from her being on the right path to living, and in science, that's how it works. You have to have trial and error to find the right answer. I just remember that moment thinking, "Holy cow, how is it that we thought we knew so much? We thought we knew that had to be the one she needed to be on because it was going to be the best for her. We were so mad that she got the other one." Then it turns out if she hadn't gotten the harsher chemo, who knows where we'd be? This is one of the hard things too, the guilt that parents feel because you're in the hospital on a cancer floor, and you're not the only person there with cancer.

To build a little bit of network or camaraderie with…

There's maybe 15-20 kids on a floor battling for their lives. The harsh reality is some of those kids don't go home. You watch parents clean out some of those rooms and go, "Why are we still here?"

Take your breath away moment.

Yeah, why does Maddie get to survive this? How do you balance that now, 9-10 years later, helping your child understand you are built for a greater purpose? We don't know what that purpose is. But then also balancing that with like, you're nine, so don't feel so much pressure to be so great. It's so hard not to be a kid, right? That's what we're dealing with now. She wants to be so smart. She wants to be a doctor. We're like, "That's awesome. You're nine. Let's chill out a little bit."

Let's get through fourth grade, yeah. You mentioned that she went through this as an infant. She's nine. Just give us the update.

Oh my gosh, she's the smartest kid on the planet. I'm biased, but she is so brilliant. She says stuff where I'm like, I don't even know it. Her teacher this last year, they're talking about continents, and the teacher's like, "Africa is the largest continent." Maddie is like, "I think it might be Asia." The teacher says, "No, I'm pretty sure it's Africa." She's pretty sure it's Asia. And sure enough, she's right. Just stuff like that. She loves softball. She recently fell in love with the sport. I love watching her out there. She got hit twice in the same game in the same spot right in the kidney, just a ball pelted her. Most kids would really take that hard. Not her. She took off to first base. She knew she got up. I have zero doubt that's because of what she's been through. She's tougher than all good.

You've learned a lot from her, haven't you? She keeps on laughing. The moment of diagnosis has sustained you. The joy she's bringing you now keeps you going, right? That laughter keeps going, doesn't it?

Comedy and laughter are such a huge part of our family. Now that she's getting older, she understands jokes and how to use her cancer diagnosis in those jokes. I find that beyond hilarious. Even simple things like, "Hey, you need to get your room clean." Dad, just not feeling it. I've been through so much in life. I'm like, "Listen, I love you so much. You're nine years old, you're healthy, get your tail up."

You've got to balance parenting with compassion.

Exactly, yes, sir. She's so funny, and we all laugh.

Just for one moment, put yourself in that position. There's somebody out there with a kiddo, an infant through leukemia diagnosis. It's kind of bad. Just one word of encouragement, Cody, for that mom and dad going through this.

I would simply say, love your child, take the opportunity to love on them, and spend each second knowing that you're there to make them feel loved because they may not know what they're going through. Even if they do know, they have you there, right? So show that love to them. Know that there's help. If you need help, don't be afraid to call someone and say, "Hey, I'm really struggling." I just stopped going to therapy a couple of months ago. It's awesome, having that opportunity to talk it out and say, "I'm mad, I'm ticked off." But knowing that there's going to be something good on the other side of this, hopefully, is what you cling to in that.

Love on them and reach out for help for you. Absolutely. That's good. Cody, if people want to be in contact with you and learn more about what you're about, how can they find out more about Cody Adams?

Of course, Facebook Cody Adams TV, Instagram Cody Adams TV, X Cody Adams TV. Basically anything Cody Adams TV. Google me, and you'll find me. You can also reach me here at WishTV. I love chatting with people and hearing stories. You may not think that you have a story, but I promise you do, and I would love to hear it.

You're a great storyteller and also a great story listener. Thank you, and I certainly appreciate that. Our guest today on Cancer and Comedy, Cody Adams from Wish TV in Indianapolis. Thank you, Cody, for being our guest here on Cancer Comedy.

Thank you. I certainly appreciate it.