For UK student, ‘It’s a miracle DanceBlue was right down the road’

LEXINGTON, Ky. (March 20, 2025) – On March 29, hundreds of University of Kentucky students will fill the floor of Historic Memorial Coliseum and stand for 24 hours to support the patients in the DanceBlue Kentucky Children’s Hospital Hematology/Oncology Clinic.

This year DanceBlue is celebrating its 20th annual dance marathon. The organization, run completely by UK students, raised $2.1 million for the clinic in 2024.

It’s all for patients like 22-year-old Jacob McNiel, who has spent hours in the DanceBlue Clinic receiving treatment.

McNiel spent time growing up in Winchester, Kentucky, and Washington, Missouri. Raised as a Wildcat fan, when it came time to decide on college, he knew UK was where he wanted to spend his next four years.

Now a junior at UK, he studies aerospace engineering in the Stanley and Karen Pigman College of Engineering.

While at UK in October 2023, McNiel felt some pain in his left leg. He was in the process of scheduling appointments to identify his leg pain when he traveled on a research trip with the College of Engineering’s unmanned aerial vehicles lab for the National Eclipse Balloon Project.  

When he returned to Lexington on Oct.15, he began having extreme difficulty breathing.

“I couldn’t fully inhale,” McNiel said. “I couldn’t take a huge breath; it was very light and shallow. I was pretty much holding my breath.”

With the symptom persisting, he went to the emergency room. McNiel explained his breathing troubles to the emergency doctor and mentioned his leg pain, which had turned out to be a pathologic fracture.

“The doctor’s eyes turned into a worried look,” McNiel said. ”He told me he was going to run a few more tests.”

After several scans and medical tests, McNiel was told he had a tumor on his leg that had metastasized to his chest, spreading into both lungs and filling his left lung with liquid.

He received the official diagnosis of metastatic Ewing sarcoma, a rare type of bone cancer that typically affects children and young adults.

After a few days, he was transferred to the UK Albert B. Chandler Hospital and immediately began conversations with the DanceBlue Clinic, which treats pediatric and young adults patients with cancer. He received a second opinion at Vanderbilt University Medical Center, but ultimately decided the DanceBlue Clinic was the best option for him to receive treatment.

The DanceBlue Clinic usually sees three to five cases of Ewing sarcoma each year.

McNiel started chemotherapy infusions on Oct. 30, 2023, just two weeks after his initial visit to the emergency room.

Soon after all the holidays passed, he developed extreme chronic pain as a side effect from the chemo. Facing this pain was one of the biggest challenges he faced while going through his treatment: 14 rounds of chemotherapy and 43 days of radiation to his pelvis and lungs. On June 14, 2024, McNiel had his last day of IV chemotherapy.

“That was a good day, when they told me I was done with it. I was so thankful,” McNiel said. “I still had to go in for more pain management and then I was done with the hospital for a little bit.”

Now, McNiel takes Cabozantinib, a daily maintenance chemo pill as part of a clinical trial.

“He is currently on a clinical trial at Ohio State University. They are trying to see if there is benefit to adding a maintenance phase of therapy with an oral agent, ultimately to determine if this improves outcomes for patients with high risk sarcomas,” said Caryn Sorge, M.D., oncologist at the DanceBlue Clinic.

McNiel has been on the maintenance chemo treatment since September 2024 and will continue until this fall.

For the past year-and-a-half, McNiel has been on a journey no college student ever imagines would be a reality. But, with the strength in his faith, the support of his family and the care team at DanceBlue Clinic, he finds gratitude in every day.

“I have such a phenomenal team at DanceBlue,” McNiel said. “If I went anywhere else, I don’t think I would be where I am now. It’s a miracle that DanceBlue was right down the road from me. I was right where I needed to be.”

He is thankful for all of the DanceBlue staff who take care of him, but has an extra appreciation for the nurses who helped him during his time spent in the inpatient unit.

“They’ve got to be angels from heaven,” McNiel said. “Nurse Emily was there for me during a lot of the pain treatments I was going through. I was writhing in pain, no amount of medicine was making me feel better, but Emily would sit there with me. She held my hand, talked to me, let me cry, scream and yell. She was there with me through it all.”

McNiel also has the best support from his dad, stepmom, mom, girlfriend and family who have all been by his side since the day he received his diagnosis.

Before becoming a patient at the clinic, he had heard about the DanceBlue fundraiser on campus, but never thought it was something that would fully impact him. Now the student organization’s 24-hour dance marathon holds a new meaning to him.

“Watching all the students come together to raise money for the clinic shows the humanity and compassion this world still has,” McNiel said. “There are people out there who care for others. Everyone coming together from different backgrounds to support people who are going through a really terrible time, it’s so good to see God’s work through all of DanceBlue.”

McNiel’s journey with DanceBlue will continue as he remains on the maintenance chemotherapy medication as part of the clinical trial. Although they have been able to reduce the tumor, the cancer is still in his hip and lungs. The goal is to stabilize the disease to keep it from growing.

“Jacob has had to overcome a lot of health challenges during his treatment and has been very resilient,” Sorge said. “Since completing initial upfront therapy, he has been able to get back into college and has been motivated to get back to where he was before diagnosis. He is very intelligent and has had many academic accomplishments during his time at UK. I’m hopeful that he will continue to achieve great things.”

For now, McNiel will keep pushing forward every day, with the plan to graduate from the College of Engineering at UK and start a career where he can build satellites to study outer space.

“I hope and pray every day that God takes the cancer,” McNiel said. “I don’t know how short or how long my life will be, but I’m going to try to enjoy the time I have now. The relationships I’ve built have become so much more important to me. Even though it’s death in front of you and pain behind you, still enjoy life as much as you possibly can because it’s so finite.”

Learn more about the DanceBlue Clinic and marathon here.