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It was just a routine doctor's visit. Alecia kept telling me she was freezing cold and at times when I'd look at her she seemed pale but then a few minutes later she'd be fine. Within a couple of days she was sleeping through most of the day. I wondered if she might be coming down with the flu. After all, it was February and the kids had all been sharing the colds they were bringing home from school. When I noticed her little body covered with dark bruises that seemed to appear out of nowhere, I made her an appointment with our family doctor. My first thought was anemia. I had been battling iron anemia off and on for years so I knew the symptoms. I just assumed that her doctor would prescribe her some vitamins or change her diet and send her home. How wrong could I be?
When we arrived at the doctor's office, Alecia's lips were blue. She had been pale but never like this. The nurse took us back to a room and the moment her doctor came in, before even examining her, he said he wanted bloodwork. He told my husband and I that he thought she was anemic. With some relief I started to relax...after all, I knew what anemia was and that it could be treated. Alecia would be fine.
Half an hour later after having gone to the lab for a blood draw, as we sat in the exam room waiting, her doctor came to the door and called my husband and I out of the room. That is never a good sign...and it had never happened before in the ten years he had been taking care of my children. Something was wrong. We went into his office and he asked us to sit down.
It literally took seconds for my heart to fall into my feet, my head to start spinning, and everything that I knew as being the normalness of life to end. "The results are back, Alecia is severly anemic" the doctor said as he started to tear up. "and the tests came back positive, Alecia has leukemia."
There is nothing that can prepare a parent to hear the words "your daughter has leukemia" and there is also no way to tell a five year old little girl without a care in the world that she has cancer. Your lives are literally changed in an instant. I sat in the doctor's office for the longest time. I wanted to run to my little girl and scoop her up and run far away in an attempt to make it not true but I simply couldn't make my body work to stand up and walk back to the exam room. When I finally stood and walked to the closed exam room, I couldn't bring myself to open the door. Tears streaming down my face and an ache in my heart that I couldn't stop, I finally walked into the room. The moment Alecia saw my tears, she started to cry...for no other reason than because mommy was crying and she knew something was wrong. The only words I could find for her were that she was very very sick but that the doctors were going to make her all better. The doctor was crying, daddy and mommy were crying, and Alecia was terrified. She buried her head in my chest. I held her as tightly as I could and with daddy's arms wrapped around us..we all just cried.
From that moment, life became a whirlwind...moving Alecia to the emergency room in the hospital adjacent to the doctor's office and prepping her for an emergency flight from Idaho to Primary Children's Hospital in Utah. Then there were five incredibly draining days in the hopsital going through numerous blood transfusions, an operation to implant a port-a-cath in her chest, and the start of chemo treatments while mom and dad learned how to take care of a child with Acute Lymphoblastic Leukemia (ALL). There was the constant reassurance that ALL has a high cure rate in children and that Alecia would survive this but that the treatment time was two and a half years.
The day Alecia was released from the hospital, I could barely breathe. It should have been a relief that she was going home but it was easier to think of cancer treatment while Alecia was admitted in the hospital. Now we were going home... and as I would soon find out...nothing would be the same again..for any of us.
