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Juliana's Story |
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When Laura was 30 weeks pregnant with her fourth child she ran into Dr. Mahendra Patel whom she had met eight years earlier. His parting words on this day were to not hesitate to call if she ever needed him. Laura would have no idea how soon their paths would cross again.
In 1998, Dr. Patel, a pediatric hematologist/oncologist at Methodist Children's Hospital* had been involved in the care of Maegan, Laura’s daughter who had died of multi-organ failure resulting from a mysterious illness at just 10 months old. At autopsy, Maegan was diagnosed with HLH—hemophagocytic lymphohistiocytosis—a rare immune disorder that was not well understood at the time.
“Two weeks after I ran into Dr. Patel they were wheeling me in for a C-section and I said we need to call him. It was a déjà vu labor,” says Laura. Juliana was born with the same symptoms and same blood counts as Maegan. “The next thing we knew Dr. Patel was there, he made the diagnosis of HLH right away and put Juliana on the transplant list immediately.” By this time—2007—advances in the understanding of HLH meant a stem cell transplant was the only known cure for her baby.
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William's Story |
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In June 2007, at just three weeks old, William broke out in a rash covering his face, arms and legs. It was eventually diagnosed as Sweet syndrome or acute febrile neutrophilic dermatosis—a skin disorder that’s very rare in newborns and usually associated with some kind of cancer, although there didn’t seem to be any sign of cancer at that time.
After about 18 months of doctors’ visits, hospitalizations and symptoms that confounded and frustrated everyone, William was finally diagnosed with JMML—Juvenile Myelomonocytic Leukemia and referred to the Pediatric Bone and Marrow Stem Cell Transplant Program at Texas Transplant Institute** at Methodist Children's Hospital of South Texas* in San Antonio.
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Jeanne’s Story: An Update |
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 Jeanne and her family have recently been communicating with Jeanne’s bone marrow donor, a young man from Germany who is scheduled to travel to Texas in September, 2011. Stay tuned for more updates when Jeanne and her donor meet later this summer.
To hear Jeanne’s mom, Donaji, tell it you’d almost think her young daughter’s leukemia and subsequent bone marrow transplant were a normal part of childhood.
From the time Donaji noticed Jeanne’s leg was bothering her in June 2008 to a diagnosis of acute myelogenous leukemia, or AML, to a bone marrow transplant in early November 2008 just weeks before Jeanne’s third birthday, the process went pretty much by the book.
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