When Kooper Hernandez was five years old, he spent his summer the way many Central Texas boys do: outside, racing through the backyard, jumping on the trampoline, and squeezing every last minute out of summer vacation.
One afternoon in June 2015, after jumping on the trampoline at his grandparents’ house, he ran inside. His mother, Mindee, was about to remind him to close the back door when he turned to do it himself—and suddenly, his femur snapped.
The injury immediately raised alarms. The femur is the strongest bone in the human body, and healthy bones don’t simply break from turning around. Kooper was rushed to a nearby hospital before being transferred to Dell Children’s, where specialists began searching for answers.
Four days later, a biopsy confirmed a diagnosis no family is prepared to hear.
Kooper had cancer.
“They told us his entire femur was covered in cancer,” Mindee recalled. “I remember asking, ‘How did we not know?'”
Doctors explained that the cancer had likely been growing for months, perhaps as long as a year. Looking back, there had been only one clue: weeks earlier, Kooper had complained that his leg hurt. His parents assumed it was growing pains, especially because his father, Jon, is 6’5″ and Kooper was steadily growing himself.
“Before his diagnosis, there wasn’t anything that would have made us think of cancer,” Mindee said. “It was just one of those things you never imagine happening to your child.”
An Impossible Decision
Within days, life became a whirlwind of scans, specialists, and treatment plans. Mindee and Jon suddenly found themselves learning the language of pediatric cancer while caring for two young children at home. Mindee was also five months pregnant with their third child.
After ten weeks of chemotherapy, Kooper’s care team delivered another devastating update: the cancer had spread too extensively through his femur to save his leg.
To save his life, doctors would need to amputate his leg at the hip.
Explaining that to a five-year-old required a different kind of language—and extraordinary sensitivity.
Like many little boys his age, Kooper loved the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles. His parents told him chemotherapy was “Ninja Turtle juice” fighting the bad guys inside his leg. When it became clear the medicine wasn’t enough, they explained that God needed his leg in heaven more than they needed it here and that one day he would get it back.
“He understood,” Mindee said. “He just accepted it.”
His resilience surprised nearly everyone around him.
Choosing Hope Every Day
Kooper’s treatment lasted 48 weeks. One week after his amputation, Mindee developed dangerously high blood pressure and delivered the couple’s third child weeks earlier than expected.
The months that followed were a blur of chemotherapy appointments, sleepless nights with a newborn, caring for another young child, and working enough hours to maintain the family’s health insurance.
People often told Mindee how strong she seemed. “They’d say, ‘You’re so positive,'” she said. “But I wasn’t happy. Inside, I was falling apart.” Still, she knew her son was watching.
“I knew he was feeding off my energy,” she said. “If I wanted him to believe he could do this, I had to believe it too.”
Behind closed doors, she often cried after everyone else had gone to sleep. Looking back, she wishes she’d accepted more help.
“I thought asking for help meant I was weak,” she said. “Now I tell every family the exact opposite. Ask for the help. Let people love you.”
Building a Life Beyond Cancer
Today, Kooper is 16 years old.
He’s an accomplished adaptive athlete who competes in wheelchair basketball and track and field. As a freshman, he earned silver and bronze medals at the UIL state championships. His family once had no idea what Kooper would even be able to do after losing his leg. Now, they’ve discovered there are scholarship opportunities available that could allow him to continue competing at the collegiate level.
His life is full, busy, and remarkably ordinary in many ways. But survivorship doesn’t mean cancer disappears. There are follow-up appointments, lifelong medications, adaptive equipment, and the realities of living without a leg. As Kooper has grown, so have the challenges—and the opportunities.
“People think you’re done with cancer when treatment ends,” Mindee said. “But people who’ve lived through it know it never completely leaves your life.”
Despite that, she says she wouldn’t change what the experience shaped her family into.
“Would I change my child getting cancer? Absolutely,” she said. “But I wouldn’t change what our journey has made us.”
Paying It Forward
Not long after treatment ended, Kooper approached his mom with an idea.
“He said, ‘Mom, I want to help people the way people helped us.'”
That conversation became Super Kooper, the family’s nonprofit dedicated to supporting children facing cancer and providing adaptive sports equipment for kids with disabilities.
Today, the organization hosts the annual Super Kooper Golf Tournament, bringing together supporters from across Central Texas, including former University of Texas athletes, to raise funds for families navigating childhood cancer. The nonprofit also helps purchase specialized wheelchairs and adaptive sports equipment that can cost thousands of dollars and are often not covered by insurance.
Mindee says the organization exists because of the generosity her own family experienced. Throughout Kooper’s treatment, Dell Children’s and partners like Big Love Cancer Care provided practical resources, emotional support, and encouragement when they needed it most.
“They helped us in ways we didn’t even know we needed,” she said.
Eleven years after Kooper’s diagnosis, the Hernandez family continues to celebrate milestones they once feared they might never reach. For Mindee, that’s what survivorship really means.
It’s not simply beating cancer. It’s using everything you learned along the way to make the journey a little easier for the family that comes next.