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From The Orange County Register's article on Casey Strale, "The Miracle Kid".

He remembers floating to the top of the room and looking down on his family gathered around his hospital bed. Good trick for a little boy pumped so full of drugs he was paralyzed.

He remembers being trapped in an elevator in Mexico, even through he never has been trapped in an elevator or been to Mexico.

He remembers traveling to Maui, another place Casey Strale, at that time, never had been to.

He remembers the details, but he doesn't remember the dying, which his dad, Chris, is pretty certain happened in there somewhere, too.

And so it was that father and son were at Children's Hospital of Orange County. A regularly scheduled check-up. The clinician looked at Casey, looked down at Casey's chart and then looked up again.

"Oh, you're 'The Miracle Kid,' aren't you?"

We're back with an update today, refreshing a story presented in this space in March, a story about a child and a killer – adrenal cortical carcinoma.

To recap: Casey, once given a 15 percent chance to live, beat a tumor, beat open-heart surgery, beat a delicate procedure that placed him on a breathing machine, beat the equally delicate procedure that removed him from that machine, beat a second operation, beat collapsed lungs and failing kidneys.

Beat the odds, this boy did, his parents told four times that their first-born child was near death. Now, Casey is faring brilliantly against the cancer, his next miracle requiring him to be nothing more than a kid.

He's going out to play.

Casey will participate Oct. 15-17 in Give Blood, Play Hockey, an inline charity tournament at 949 Roller Hockey Arena in Irvine. Along with raising money for CHOC, organizers hope to collect 200 pints of blood.

"It's hockey," says Jay Piz, co-chair of the event, "with a heart."

And with a smiling, freckled face, 13-year-old Casey the tournament's official ambassador.

Last year, at the third-annual Give Blood, Play Hockey, Chris informed anyone who would listen that his elder son would play in the 2010 tournament. At the time, Casey was in a coma.

He had cleared a couple horrifying hurdles, but the battle was still raging and the hours still would become days and the days months.

Casey was so heavily sedated – at least 10 types of medication, three times a day – he was dreaming or hallucinating or both, an imagination running for a body that couldn't. Once, he was on a game show; his dad was the show's host.

He remembers standing in a tower, having only one leg and his body turning into a ball of light. He remembers a woman holding a baby. He remembers being pulled up, up, up, toward the sky and into a bright cone, noticing the five stars that were present and the one that was missing.

The cancer is awful, Casey's parents would learn, and so is the cure. His come down from the drugs included the shakes and the sweats, Casey more than once trying to rip all the tubes from his body.

And as vivid as the details remain about things that didn't happen, Casey has no recollection of so many of the things that did.

Like the hospital visit from Teemu Selanne, the photos proving to Casey that he really did clutch Selanne's hand. And the mornings he spent singing songs he'd learned in choir. And the day when, feeling thirsty, Casey asked his mother, Traci, for something to drink.

"What would you like?" she asked him.

Quite seriously, he answered, "A beer."

"He basically slept through the trauma," Traci says today, smiling. "They should have given us the same drugs."

Casey now is down to two types of daily medication. His blood is tested monthly, his body scanned every three months. Doctors consider him to be "under maintenance." Remission isn't officially declared until a patient is cancer-free for five years.

"Looking at him or talking to him," Traci says, "you'd never know anything even happened."

Despite missing 5½ months of school, Casey passed the eighth grade by working with a teacher at home. Chris: "Everyone at his school was shocked. We were shocked. It was like he never missed a day."

Casey is now a freshman at Woodbridge High, playing lacrosse as well as hockey. He's running for student council.

And he's the face of the 2010 Give Blood, Play Hockey. More importantly, Casey's just a player in the tournament, another kid behind a wire facemask with wheels on his feet.

"I'm looking forward to playing," he says. "It's going to be fun."

In July, the Make-A-Wish Foundation sent the Strale family to Hawaii. Looking on from his beach chair, watching his son bob in the warm surf, Chris thought, "OK, after all the hoses and tubes and everything else, he's earned this."

The fact they were in Maui is notable, "The Miracle Kid" having seen the future even while his eyes were closed.