4 Inspiring Health Stories That Made The World Seem A Little Less Terrible

Certain stories made us feel pretty good this year.

Some stories were about children or adults who overcame cancer or physical or mental illness, who are now living their best life despite these challenges.

Others were about people who had a birth or breastfeeding experience that we found pretty inspiring.

The world is a difficult place to be in sometimes. These were some inspiring stories of people who faced health problems or challenges, had a cool life experience, or underwent groundbreaking surgery, which made us feel a little bit better about being in this world.

1. Batkid was declared cancer-free.

Miles Scott stole everyone's heart as a 5-year-old leukemia patient who took over San Francisco in 2013 as Batkid after he told the Make-A-Wish Foundation that he wanted to be Batman. People crowded the streets to cheer him on after San Francisco was turned into Gotham for a day with the help of late mayor Ed Lee and 20,000 volunteers. This year, the foundation announced that Miles, now 10, has been in remission for five years. This is an important milestone when many people can be considered as likely to be cancer-free.

2. This nurse realized that the last time she met her new coworker doctor was when she cared for him years ago as a preemie.

Brandon Seminatore is a pediatric resident in California and ended up working at the Lucile Packard Children’s Hospital in Palo Alto, the same hospital where he was born decades earlier.

A preemie (he was born at 29 weeks of gestation, while a full-term pregnancy is around 40 weeks), he spent more than a month in the neonatal intensive care unit.

A nurse named Vilma Wong, who had worked at the hospital for 32 years, thought his name sounded familiar.

“To confirm, I asked him if his dad was a police officer, and there was a big silence. And then he asked me if I was Vilma. I said yes,” Wong said.

Seminatore was impressed with Wong's dedication and love for her patients, so much so that she remembered the family decades later. They both hope their story lifts up parents who are undergoing a difficult time and have babies in a newborn intensive care unit.

3. This little girl with big, beautiful eyes.

Mehlani lives in Minnesota, and her mom, Karina Martinez, is often stopped by strangers who comment on the toddler's big, beautiful eyes. The little girl has Axenfeld-Rieger syndrome, a genetic condition that can cause eye abnormalities and increase the risk of glaucoma, a sight-robbing condition.

Martinez tweeted about her daughter's condition this year, and the tweets went viral. After that, parents of other children with the condition reached out to her, which has been helpful.

"People are super nice and just letting me know if I had any questions I could ask them," she told BuzzFeed News.

4. This woman walked with the help of an epidural stimulator implanted in her spine.

This year was an exciting one when it came to research into treatments for spinal cord injuries that have caused complete paralysis from the chest or waist down. Once told there was no hope they could ever walk again, a handful of paralyzed patients had a treatment — an epidural stimulator implanted in the spine — that seemed to offer a more hopeful prognosis, as reported by at least three separate research teams.

After months of arduous training after the epidural stimulators were put into place, the patients have been able to recover at least some ability to take steps — and, in one woman's case, actually use a walker instead of a wheelchair, at least some of the time while at home.

Kelly Thomas of Citrus County, Florida, had the implant and training, and can now switch on the device and use a walker to stand and take steps around her home.

“I don’t want people to think you just turn it on and you are good to go — that’s not the case. It takes hours and hours and hours of dedication,” she told BuzzFeed News. “It’s not for the faint of heart … There are days you just want to cry and quit.”

The research teams working on this include the Kentucky Spinal Cord Research Center at the University of Louisville, which pioneered the technique; a team at University of California Los Angeles and the Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minnesota, as well as one at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Lausanne, Switzerland.