MINNEAPOLIS -- The children Kyle Rudolph sees hooked up to medical devices at the University of Minnesota Masonic Children's Hospital -- or the parents there with them, trying to force smiles through their kaleidoscopes of emotion -- could have just as easily been in his own family.
When the Minnesota Vikings tight end was 15 months old, his younger brother Casey was born with neuroblastoma, an aggressive form of cancer that forms in nerve cells and attacks infants. Casey Rudolph went straight from the hospital where he was born to Cincinnati Children's Hospital, where he spent the first year of his life undergoing chemotherapy; he had a kidney and adrenal gland removed before beating the disease.