Brandon Swenson was 7 years old when he started noticing bruises all over his body. And he had been feeling so tired.

His parents wondered if someone was bullying him at school.

When his pediatrician ran blood tests, he sent them straight to St. Louis Children's Hospital. His white blood cell count was dangerously low. Within hours, doctors started Brandon on chemotherapy.

His parents were told their son had leukemia and would need 2 1/2 years of treatment.

"To go from everything's fine ... to 2 1/2 years of chemo. We were like, 'What?'" recalled his father, Chris Swenson, of Lake Saint Louis, Missouri.

The news spread quickly, particularly among members of Brandon's hockey club, the St. Peters Spirit.

When Kim Dannegger, whose son also played with the St. Peters Spirit, heard about Brandon, she remembers thinking how sad it was. Her son, Jack, was active and healthy, and had perfect attendance the year before in second grade.

A few months later, Jack got a cough. A low-grade fever followed. His mother worried he might be coming down with strep throat.

She took him to the pediatrician, who saw Jack's swollen belly and slightly jaundiced skin and sent them straight to the emergency room.

She had called her husband, who was on a business trip in Kansas City, to come home early. When the doctors reviewed Jack's blood tests, they told her she needed to get her husband on the phone immediately.

"Jack has leukemia," the pediatric oncologist said.

"I don't remember anything after that," Dannegger said.

Jack figured it had to be something bad, because he could hear his father crying on the phone from across the room.

Both Brandon and Jack were given a promising prognosis. A full recovery was likely, but the next 2 1/2 years of treatment would be brutal. And so it began: days, weeks and months in and out of hospitals. Intense chemotherapy, surgeries and painful procedures.

Sometimes, even very brave children surprise us with how they handle adversity.

Brandon's father says he never once heard his son complain. Before Brandon had a central IV line, or port, put in his chest, the nurses had to stick him repeatedly for blood samples. One night, he had to have his blood drawn nearly a dozen times, his father remembered.

"They'd wake him up, and they'd have two people (ready) to hold him down," he said. But they never needed to restrain him. Brandon would put his arm out each time. "By the eighth, ninth and 10th time, he'd wince, but he'd put his arm out," his father said.

Still an avid hockey fan, Brandon kept his sticks with him in the hospital room. He named his IV stand Chris Mason after his favorite goalie, and put a bearded face on it. He wrote in an online journal that he wanted to persuade the nurses to let him put a Blues jersey over the stand.

Jack went through 10 rounds of cranial radiation and faced 111 straight weeks of chemo. Two of the friends he made during his treatment died.

"But they don't have what I have, right?" he asked his mother. She reassured him that he would get better. She kept her own fears buried.

"That first month, all you can do is get on your knees," she said.

The boys began responding to treatments, and when hockey season started, they wanted to play again. The ports that delivered the medicines to their bodies each week were protected behind chest pads. They would show up to practices after chemo, and the coaches would tell them to skate to the bench if they got too tired. But they rarely did.

It was a chance to play.

This year, they both ended up on the same team. When the coach's wife, who is also the team manager, found out Brandon, now 9, and Jack, 10, were finishing up 2 1/2 years of chemo, she wanted the club to recognize the battle they had been fighting off the ice. Parents and friends pledged that for each goal scored this season, money would go to Friends of Kids With Cancer. They wore orange, the color that symbolizes leukemia, and kicked off fundraising with orange balloons. Other teams heard about the boys and asked to contribute.

The week after Brandon's last chemo treatment, and just before Jack's last one, their young teammates staged a surprise before practice. When the boys skated into the rink, they were greeted by a semicircle of about 70 young hockey players down on one knee.

In youth hockey, when a player gets hurt, the others players on the ice take a knee in a show of support. When the injured player returns, they tap the ice with their sticks.

Brandon and Jack seemed confused by the sight: rows of children, all their regular laces replaced with orange ones, banging orange-taped hockey sticks on the ice.

The boys skated to their team bench, and their fathers walked onto the ice and led them to the center of the rink.

Every parent in the stands stood to cheer.

There's a mild-mannered warrior in the front lines of the propaganda wars.

Kylie Peters, a librarian in the Chicago area, has been concerned about the rise of so-called "fake news": deliberately false stories made to appear factual, designed to sway public opinion.

"Librarians are the original search engine," said Peters, who works at Geneva Public Library in suburban Chicago. A recent analysis showed that fake or hoax stories got more reader engagement on Facebook than real news stories during the last three months of the election.

"People think they don't need libraries because of Google. In fact, they need us more than ever to help them combat information overload, and sort and evaluate the current glut of information," Peters wrote in a recent Facebook post. She shared strategies for identifying false information and biases, noting that biases are not always bad -- as long as you know what they are.

Here are her tips for helping your children learn how to distinguish facts from fiction or propaganda online:

"Your first stop when you visit an unfamiliar website should be the 'about' page. Is the information there neutral? Why does this website exist? Who funds the site? Who owns it? Who runs it? What are that person or people's goals? Are contributors paid? What is the submission process for content? All of these can be clues about both accuracy and biases.

"Scroll to the very bottom of the page and look at who owns the copyright. Is it an individual? A business? A smaller division of a large business? What makes this site qualified to provide accurate information on the topic the site covers?

"Does the website cite its sources? Are the sources reliable? Does it link to reliable sites?"

Peters encourages readers to get context clues from a site's domain name -- "sites that end in .gov are from the U.S. government, while .edu is an educational institution" -- and reminds them to trust their guts. If a site looks unprofessional, it probably is.

"Look at graphic design. Your instincts are right on this one: Poor graphic design may be an indicator of low-quality material. The same goes for material with lots of grammar and spelling errors, exclamation points and capital letters."

It gets trickier when it comes time to evaluate the content itself. Keep an eye out for this kind of language, Peters says:

"Watch for 'bias words' that indicate emotion, opinion or slant, or linguistic tricks to make things sound a certain way. Unbiased words will be neutral, and will make sense when used in both a positive and a negative sentence. For example:

'She was applauded for advocating a new immigration policy.'

'She was criticized for advocating a new immigration policy.'

"These both make sense, so in this case, 'advocating' is a neutral description."

One of Peters' most critical tips?

"Don't use Google search rankings as an indicator of accuracy!" To drive the point home, she shared this example: "I just Googled 'Martin Luther King Jr.' and the fourth result was a white supremacist site. We don't know Google's algorithm for search results," she says, and even if someone figured it out, the algorithm is constantly changing.

"The more a site is linked to by other sites and shared on social media, the more likely it is to be high on the results page. Your results may be affected by your location and by your previous searches. Sites portraying a subject positively tend to appear at the top of the page, and negatively, at the bottom." Business considerations are at play, too: "Google owns a lot of products, and it pushes its own properties to the top of the search results.

"Website owners know you're most likely to click one of the top five search results. There are a lot of tricks people will use to make their Google search rankings go up. For example, by artificially increasing the number of links to their site or by showing search engines different data from what they show human visitors. Google tries to catch spam and stop manipulation of its system, but it's an ongoing war."

Think you and your child are ready to spot the fake news from the real? Try this test: Google the phrase "Save the Pacific Northwest Tree Octopus" and click on the site that comes up first.

"Can you identify the clues that this is not a reliable website?" Peters asks. "Even better, show the site to someone who doesn't know about it and see if they believe it. This site was specifically designed to teach students digital literacy, and has some built-in clues to help you identify it as false information."

Identifying reliable websites and sources "may sound like a lot of work, but it becomes quick and easy once you've had some practice," says Peters.

Other librarians added their own tips to her suggestions. One mentioned "triangulation," meaning "visiting at least three sites to verify the facts."

If you do get overwhelmed, Peters reminds you that librarians are there to help.

"If you haven't been to your local library lately, you should go," she says. "It's probably a lot cooler than you think."

A best-selling African-American writer and speaker stood in front of nearly a thousand St. Louis University students and broke into song.

"There will never be a n*gg*r in SAE. There will never be a n*gg*r in SAE. You can hang him from a tree, but he can never sign with me. There will never be a n*gg*r in SAE," Lawrence Ross sang.

The audience of mostly white students looked uncomfortable.

Ross acknowledged that he opened his talk with that racial slur because he didn't want to shield students from the ugliness of the word. He sang the same lyrics that Sigma Alpha Epsilon members from the University of Oklahoma were caught on video singing last year. The university later shut down the chapter.

Ross also showed slide after slide of other racist acts that have surfaced since the SAE incident -- white students in blackface, others dressed in white hoods and still others wearing Obama masks with nooses.

The SLU fraternity and sorority leadership invited Ross, author of "Blackballed: The Black and White Politics of Race on America's Campuses," to tell their members about the racist legacy of America, its colleges and their own Greek organizations. He gave them a 90-minute history lesson, current events briefing and encouragement about the ways they can improve their campus in their own spheres.

The way young people look at the world -- and their role in making it a better place -- recently has been shook, as my teenage daughter would say. College students are talking about race in a way that hasn't been heard in decades.

After the protests of the Civil Rights movement, the biggest fights for equal treatment and access happened through the courts, not on college campuses. Now, a new generation has found its political voice and muscle. For example, since Ferguson, there have been widespread protests on campuses -- more than 100 of them. Ross showed the students the multicultural alliances that cut across racial groups and stand against bigotry.

Ross' mission goes beyond shining a light on problems that have been festering for years. He has a more ambitious goal: Get those who are oblivious to racism to see where it exists -- even on their sheltered and protective campuses -- and to recognize how they've personally benefited from institutions predicated on giving whites privilege above everyone else.

What makes this endeavor particularly difficult is that everyone wants to believe what they've achieved comes from their own talents or hard work. The backlash to challenging this idea can be rage. "The things I have are mine! Stop being a victim!" is a common response, Ross said.

In an online review of Ross' book, a white professor said that the "us versus them" debates framed around affirmative action hurt race relations. Getting students to recognize their own advantages is always a struggle. For example, if he asked white students how they got their first job, he wrote, some may have had a parent or relative who helped get them a foot in the door -- an internship, a entry-level job or even an interview.

"In other words, through no skill of their own, someone acted 'affirmatively' to give that person a leg up," wrote the reviewer. "But many white students don't see it that way. They see that sort of advantage as a birthright and not the advantage of nepotism or connection."

Additionally, most Americans are generally great at personal interactions with friends of different backgrounds, Ross said. We like to believe that our friendships with a diverse group of people proves our lack of racism. But our understanding of institutional racism, its historical origins and lasting impacts, is weak, Ross said. He points out that 98 percent of FHA loans were given to white people from the 1930s to the '60s, creating a white middle class and all the advantages that arose from that. He shares the data about educational segregation that still exists, and the connection between race and educational opportunities.

Ross spoke to the students at SLU, a private Catholic university, as an insider: He is a Catholic, educated by Jesuits, and values the bonds he made at his own fraternity in college. He believes in students' power to make the world better.

They responded to his message as powerfully as he delivered it. They asked questions about how to reconcile political differences, how to increase diversity in their own organizations and how to support their classmates.

Ross' work with college students is more than an academic pursuit for him. His own son will be leaving for college next year.

"I don't bombard him with a whole bunch of things about white supremacy," Ross said with a laugh, in an interview. He suspects his son will go to college and will try to make sense of the world and find his own way of responding.

Chances are good he will find a community struggling with the same questions and galvanized to find better answers.

He encouraged the students at the SLU gathering not to be afraid to try.

They may stumble along the way, but so hopeful is their march.