Four-year-old Gage Thompson shares a special bond with the firefighters from Ladder 104 of the Unified Fire Authority.

The boy has experienced tough times in his young life, and members of Ladder 104 have been there to help him along the way. At four years old, he already knows he wants to be like them when he grows up.

Gage and his family live close to the Holladay fire station. They walk by it daily, checking out the trucks, saying hello to the firefighters. Gage even held a superhero birthday party there. But Thanksgiving weekend, after Gage had suffered for years from what doctors thought was torticollis (twisting of muscles of the neck), the visits stopped.

Gage’s mother, Gretchen Thompson, said, “He’d be playing and all of a sudden he would be like, ‘Ouch, my head hurts inside, my head.’”

Doctors found a baseball-sized tumor in Gage’s brain. Immediately he was rushed into surgery to have part of it removed.

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