January 23, 2026
The gleaming lights stream down at Aurora, as she hesitantly rises to her feet. The creak of the bed is much louder than the chatter coming from outside her door where she stands at 4 feet 10 inches, with blonde hair that wraps around her shoulders like ballet laces.
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Damn, does she miss dancing.
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She has not been in the studio for the past six months. Lost in thought, she whips around to look at her mother as they make their way down to the lobby.
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Today is known as a “reward day." After being pricked by needles and examined by doctors, it is time for a sweet treat. Aurora walks alongside her mother, Dawn Dennison, who exchanges a glance with her youngest daughter. She pushes back her brown hair to get a good look at Aurora. She is very proud of how far she has come.
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The current 19-year-old college student is a history and theatre double major with a dance minor. This girl is nothing but a show-stopper, and her can-do attitude has benefited her in many ways but has also pushed her through some of the most difficult circumstances a person could ever encounter.
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“She would sit in the doorway and watch her sister’s dance classes for almost an hour. I asked if I could sign her up, and the dance instructor was like, ‘Nah, she's too young — we usually like to sign them up when they're three, almost four,’” said Mrs. Dennison.
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This did not stop Aurora. For her, this was like being in a candy store — watching her sisters twirl around as she patiently sat only able to think about following in their footsteps.
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“‘You know what? Let her try a class and see how it goes.’ And that is how history was made,” said Mrs. Dennison.
Aurora took off and dove deeper into acting.
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She had the desire to live in the shoes of other people. Her goal was to put together the past to make sense of the present. These passions had some overlap, so she decided to dip her toes into a way that combined all three. Aurora was cast as Clara in “The Nutcracker” not only once, but multiple times, which, in the dance industry, is a difficult task.
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“This is the biggest acting part of all of the roles, which is a situation where you can be the most beautiful dancer, but if you cannot act, you cannot be cast as Clara,” said Aurora. “When I did it that year, I realized that was the part that I enjoyed the most. I loved the dancing and everything, but for me, it was the acting part.”
She flourished at 13, but that didn’t mean there weren’t any challenges. Aurora had a lot of interests, and she was able to balance all of them because she was homeschooled, which meant that her mom would often go out of her way for her children.
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She would always push them, but Aurora never needed a push for anything she was passionate about. She looked to her mom for the support and was given just that.
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“Ultimately, I provided the tools. I always encouraged them when they were homeschooled, like, if you really want something, you have to work for it," said Mrs. Dennison.
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Aurora twirled across the dance floor, her blonde hair swirling like the ribbons of a ballet slipper. Moments later, she was transported to a medieval stage setting, where a spotlight caught her crystal-blue eyes, hinting at something sinister in the character she portrayed. The audience gasped as a sly grin spread across her face.
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Blending both of her passions took a toll on her, especially since she was battling 16 bleeding ulcers.
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“I mean, I really thought she was going to want to pursue dance, but I think the strain on her body is why she's just minoring. She loves it, and she doesn't let her medical conditions control her; however, she knows her limits,” said Mrs. Dennison.
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A few years before this breathtaking role, Aurora was diagnosed with Crohn's disease at 9 years old. She also struggles with asthma and arthritis.
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“The first red flag was that I wasn't growing at all, and I hadn't grown for a year at that point,” said Aurora.
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For Aurora, this was the beginning of one of the toughest journeys she would face in her life. Her childhood consisted of different tests and labs. Even medication changes were certainly not out of the ordinary for her. Due to this trial-and-error period, a lot, unfortunately, went wrong.
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She ended up with three different kinds of near-deadly pneumonias over the course of three years. The side effects weren't pretty: frequent vomiting, not being able to walk at one point, sometimes sleeping for 18 hours due to medication changes, food allergies due to Crohn's disease, etc.
Aurora was still very young.
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It was a very difficult thing for her to understand that this was unusual for kids her age.
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“It was hard — I don't know if she fully understood how bad it was at first. She came to me one day as I was waking up and said ‘I think I know what normal people feel like,’” said Mrs. Dennison. “I was like, ‘Where did that come from?’ So she continued on and said, ‘Yeah, I woke up today, Mom, and nothing hurts. I don't remember anything ever not hurting me.’”
This did not stop her work ethic. Being homeschooled meant having the best of both worlds — a loving, supportive mom and a teacher.
“She's in the hospital, and after like two days, she's like ‘I need my schoolwork,’ and I’m like ‘That’s the least of your worries right now,’” said Mrs. Dennison. “She needed to keep going, so it felt like she wasn’t missing out. Aurora wasn't just going to sit and rest.”
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As she pranced her way through life with a chronic illness, that didn’t mean the effects of it were just physical. There were a lot of mental health challenges she experienced.
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There was a point in time when even Aurora herself had no idea if she was going to make it past this point…
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Alive.
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She didn't know if she could live a normal life. She still had so much to experience but had to leap into the hospital bed instead of the stage.
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She sat for days, weeks and eventually years staring at the same beige, vomit-colored hospital room that was just aching for some color.
The only splash of color it saw was from the crimson dripping from her skin.
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Being pricked with needles was no easy task, especially since her case was so rare. That added an extra layer to it.
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This deeply affected her mom, as the images of a heart monitor, oxygen mask and the worry of her daughter not making it through the night were very loud and prominent thoughts that rattled her brain.
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Prioritizing one's health, especially in a case as unique as hers, was a top priority; however, that came with a certain price to pay.
“It was definitely very hard coming back to dance because this is a sport where you can't just not dance for six months and come back expecting to be exactly where you were,” said Aurora. “Suddenly, I was a year behind everyone that I'd grown up dancing with, which was hard mentally to deal with, of course. It just made it a lot harder for me to reach the milestones that I wanted to in dance.”
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Undoubtedly, her battle with this invisible illness meets no end. There may be a medication change happening in her near future, which is concerning since the last time there was a medical change, there were severe side effects, such as Aurora not being able to walk and being hospitalized for a prolonged period of time.
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“I had to fight so much to get to where I'm at today, and I think it's made me a lot more resilient,” said Aurora. “I don't just give up when things get hard because I know they could be harder. It also makes me a lot less capable of looking away from other people's problems because I may not know what every struggle feels like, but I know that no one deserves to have to go through struggles they shouldn't have to.”
“So, when it comes to people's health care and their right to choose, I think it’s so important because I might not even be here today if me and my parents weren’t able to have a say and weren't able to have our doctors' voices heard by insurance companies,” said Aurora.
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Last time, this meant life or death.
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Because of this, Aurora took action and raised money for the Arthritis Foundation. This inspired so many people to the point where they have started creating a new medication for IBD..
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The first time she went in, she talked to two or three people. Then, it upgraded to six. Over time, Aurora was proudly sitting at the front of a roundtable expressing what she has endured for over 10 years.
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“One day she was like, ‘Mom, if this can help to the extent that some kid doesn't have to go through what I went through, then, yeah, sign me up,’ and she did just that,” Mrs. Dennison explained.
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Even now, her mom still is her No.1 supporter. Last year, Aurora endured an asthma attack, and her mom came down to HPU right away. Concerned as to what hospital Aurora should go to for good care, Dawn reached out to the HPU parents Facebook page for help. Aurora took an Uber to that hospital until her mom eventually made it over there.
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“I'm very grateful for all the people I have around me that are willing to support me on bad days,” said Aurora.
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“However, my mom was the person that came with me to every appointment — she would pick me up to go to MRIs, to procedures, all of it. She was always there. If there was an instance where I was in the hospital when she wasn't there, she was on the phone as much as she could be. She had a military career that she gave up, and that was her biggest dream in life. It was something she'd wanted since she was 6 years old and still gave up everything for us,” said Aurora.