Emilio was diagnosed in July 2021 with ALL. He had a low-grade fever for 4 days and was cranky. Since he is so young I first thought the fever was due to him teething. On the fourth day, I took him in to urgent care just to check to see if anything else was causing his fever. I was thinking the worse case would be that he would have an ear infection or the flu. At the urgent care, the NP stated that she thinks his skin looks a little pale and yellow. She would like to order some blood work to check everything. I looked at my son thinking I couldn’t see what she was talking about. She stated that doing blood work within her clinic would take a few days for the results to come back so she highly suggested that I take my son to the ER to get his blood tested. This is when I started to get worried but was still hoping that maybe the NP was overreacting. I did take him to the ER that day and they did draw blood on him. A few hours later his results came back and showed that everything was critically low. That is when the doctor in the ER stated that these results point to Leukemia and that we need to go to the children’s hospital to be admitted that night.
So far in the first few months of his diagnosis my son has had 6 blood infusions, 2 bone marrow biopsies, 2 lumbar punctures, and an implanted port so he can get his chemo medications. With a third bone marrow biopsy and lumbar puncture scheduled to be done within the next week. As well as being impatient at the hospital for a month. My husband and I struggle to try to be there for my son who is sick and for our older daughter who is 8. Our daughter wants to have a normal life but due to my son’s illness, she can’t which is hard for her to understand.
It was extremely hard during the first month since our son was in the hospital, myself or my husband who have to miss work in order to be there with my son. Then the other parent had to be home to also take care of our daughter. Currently, I am unable to work because my son needs me to be with him and since we get insurance through my husband’s job it is very important for him to continue working. Struggling to be in multiple places at once, financially with bills starting to come in, and also trying to make sure both my kids feel loved and heard.
We’ve had to make some big changes to how we do our day-to-day tasks just to make sure our son doesn’t catch some other illness that could seriously injure him. We’ve had to have a crash course in care for a child with cancer, needing to know what are warning signs for him getting dangerously sick. Needing to know and understand everything about his medication and diagnoses is a lot to process. As well as explaining everything that is going on with him to our daughter in a way that she can understand and also not completely scare her in the process.
He is very strong at battling this, he doesn’t show that it will slow him down one bit. He is the strongest person I know and he is not even two yet.
Hope session by Brittany Blake Photography | Facebook | Instagram