Pharah Paul: 2025 Riley Champion
To see Pharah Paul today—a bright, smiling, 7-year-old who loves art and soccer—you’d never guess that she once battled cancer. Pharah was just 3 when her parents, Natalie and Craig, took her to the emergency room after noticing a bulge in Pharah’s abdomen. After an initial evaluation detected a foreign mass, doctors in Evansville quickly arranged for Pharah to be transported by ambulance to Riley Children’s Health.
The mass turned out to be Wilms tumor, a kidney cancer that forms from immature kidney cells. While Wilms tumor is often confined to just one kidney, Pharah’s disease was aggressive. In addition to the grapefruit-sized tumor in her right kidney, the cancer had spread to her left kidney and her lungs. To treat the cancer, Riley pediatric surgeon Troy Markel, MD, removed Pharah’s right kidney and part of the left. Oncologists at Riley Children’s then recommended both chemotherapy and radiation—42 weeks of treatment in all.
During her inpatient stays at Riley, Pharah became a little celebrity—captivating nurses and care team members with her bubbly personality, stylish clothes and spontaneous dance parties. And while Natalie said it’s in Pharah’s nature to be outgoing and spirited, she and Craig were surprised by how well she managed the rigorous treatment.
“Whenever you think of cancer, you immediately think the worst, like ‘oh no, she’s going to be miserable and have no quality of life during all of this,’” Natalie said. “But even the day after surgery, Pharah was up and talking with the nurses and climbing stairs; it blew the doctors’ minds.”
Krista Hauswald, a Child Life Specialist, was one of the team members who got to know the Pauls during Pharah’s treatment at Riley. Krista was often on hand to provide procedural support and distraction when it was time for Pharah to receive her chemotherapy treatments.
“Kids don’t have a choice about being in the hospital, but we try to give them choices where they exist to help them cope with what’s going on,” Krista said. “Pharah was always in good spirits and open to suggestions on how we could make things easier for her.”
While there was nothing easy about Pharah’s treatment or the family’s experience with childhood cancer, today Pharah is cancer-free and thriving in school and as a role model for her younger siblings, Charley and August.
“She’s very protective of them and is really good about incorporating them into her play,” Natalie said. “And she loves helping them.”
Pharah doesn’t remember much about her cancer treatment, but she enjoys going to her follow-up appointments to see “her friends in red” — the phrase Natalie and Craig use to help lessen any anxiety about returning to the hospital. And for the Paul family, the staff at Riley truly are friends.
“We made a promise to ourselves as a family that we were going to work together as a team, and everybody at Riley helped us do that,” Craig said. “It would have been so much more difficult without all of the people there who supported us.”