The beginning of our Journey

Honestly I would say that my daughter was diagnosed with Leukemia by accident. She had been feeling ill for a few weeks with fevers on and off. We had been giving her Advil to deal with the fevers while we took her back and forth to her pediatrician. On one of her visits to see the pediatrician she had fallen and hurt her leg. We didn’t have much concern about it at the time because it’s pretty typical for kids to fall down and hurt themselves. We had our pediatrician check her out and she insisted that Jillian just had a contusion on her leg and that she would be fine after time. We continued to monitor her fevers and leg pain with Ibuprofen as requested by the doctor. Jillian continued to not look right, and after many comments by my mother about her paleness and overall behavior (mothers know best right?) I took her back to the doctor. Along with her fevers and leg pain she also had a rash on her feet and hands. The doctor then insisted that she had mouth, feet and hand disease, since it is just a virus there was nothing we could do for her except what we were doing. Leaving frustrated with these results we tried to continue our regular schedule with school and everything. All this time she continued to have leg pain and we tried to make her walk on it as much as possible because the doctor insisted there was nothing wrong with it. A few days passed and she attended school regularly. When picking her up from school one day her teacher stated after she woke up that she was crying about the pain in her leg and that she looked “green”, they sat her down because they thought she was going to faint. My mom and I were there picking her up and we decided to take her to the nearest med stop and just bypass the pediatrician because we would have gotten the same results from her. At the med stop we did a full exam of her leg and an X-ray, they found nothing wrong with her leg and but the doctor still felt concerned that Jilly would cry when she was forced to walk. She told us that our best option would be to take her down to Santa Barbara to see a Pediatric Orthopedic doctor. I made the appointment for that but everything happened so quickly that she never made it to that appointment. A few more days passed and we spoke to our pediatrician about the second opinion we received. She seemed a little annoyed but suggested that she could do blood work if we wanted but that she felt it was over kill but she would basically humor us. The next day we took her in to get her blood work done, that same night around 9:30 p.m. I got a call for the doctor basically telling me that her blood work came back abnormal and that Jillian was severely anemic. Because of the fact that she was getting fevers off and on for 3 weeks now with her highest fever being 104 (by the way her doctor said 104 was fine and we should be concerned if her temp went to 105, if anyone is familiar with Leukemia then they know a temp of 100 can be deadly to these children, we are lucky no major damage was done) He said we should take her to the ER because we needed more testing. My mother and father rushed over to my house to watch our son and my husband headed to the ER to meet us from work. While at the ER we did more blood work and the doctor on call there gave us the news that we never in a million years considered. That Jillian may have a cancer called Leukemia. You can imagine our shock and all the emotions that we were going through. Personally I was completely uneducated on what Leukemia was and all we could think of was WHAT IS THE SURVIVAL RATE! That’s the most important thing that goes through a parents head when they hear their child has cancer. We can manage and go through anything in hopes that in the end our daughter will live a long and full life. He was not able to tell us much, and we couldn’t really blame him since he was a general doctor. He stated that we would be ambulance rushed up to Stanford to go to Lucile Packard Children’s Hospital to receive Jillian’s official diagnosis and get a treatment plan. So Jillian and I headed to Stanford in an ambulance while Daniel (my husband) headed home to get all the stuff we needed for a long stay. He met us up in Stanford where Jillian received many many other tests…..

 

                     Jillian sleeping the night we headed to the E.R. 12/4/2012