Kaylee is very sensitive and sweet. She’s known at school for always wanting to help others. She can be shy at times, so we’re working on building her confidence. She’s currently taking Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu classes 4 times a week. She loves swimming and doing crafts and playing with her cousins. She is obsessed with her grandmother and calls her every day on Facetime. She’d rather hang out at home than go shopping. Kaylee is our whole world.
Kaylee was diagnosed with Very High Risk Acute Lymphoblastic Leukemia when she was 18 months old. She started getting bruises that I noticed weren’t going away, and they had lumps under them. Her appetite had also started to diminish and then one day when I was changing her diaper, I noticed that she had these purple spots on her chin.
Kaylee went through 2.5 years of chemo. She was hospitalized for the first 3.5 months of treatment due to life-threatening infections that she incurred because of her low immune system. We almost lost her at one point, but thank God we live in the Houston area with some of the best cancer hospitals in the country! When Kaylee is older, she will have to have plastic surgery to repair some damage from one of the infections that she had.
Kaylee also had whole brain radiation done when she was 2 years old because, at diagnosis, she had a cluster of leukemia cells in one of her eye sockets. The only struggles that we’ve faced have actually appeared recently – we’ve noticed that she has deficits with her short-term memory and some processing skills. Last school year was quite a struggle, but we’re hoping for a better year this year!
Kaylee’s cancer completely changed everything. We were living in an older house that needed work and when she got sick we knew we had to get out of that house! So, we built a new house. I was working 2 different part-time jobs and I had to quit both of them to be her full-time caretaker. We missed SO much with our friends and families because her counts were always so low that we couldn’t risk taking her anywhere. We lived in a hospital room for 3.5 months and then we were back in the hospital so many times over the first year and a half of treatment for allergic reactions, fevers, chemo, and more. We did outpatient chemo 3 times a week and a lot of the time I had to take her by myself or with my in-laws because my husband had to go to work. We had always wanted more kids, but after Kaylee got sick we decided that we wouldn’t because we could never go through that again (although, we now have an almost 2 year old ❤️).
I found this, so I think I’ll share it. It was written in 2018. Kaylee will now be celebrating 5 years off treatment at the end of this month and will officially be considered a cancer SURVIVOR!!!
“Kaylee has fought really hard, and by the grace of God and the AMAZING doctors at Texas Children’s and MD Anderson, she SURVIVED. It definitely wasn’t easy. Now, we are almost 1 year off treatment – literally the fastest year of our lives. We are so grateful and blessed that Kaylee Kicked Cancer and that she is a Healthy and Happy little girl!”
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