Our son, Ryan, was diagnosed in March of 2007 with Acute Lymphoblastic Leukemia at the age of 22 months. He is a strong little boy who has endured a lot; more than any child or adult should ever have to endure. His resilience, laughter and joyous attitude amaze us on a daily basis. He is a typical 6 year old boy who loves Legos, video games, Star Wars, animals, police cars, and firetrucks. He also loves being outdoors. He is a bright, loving and incredibly tough little kid!
Ryan was first diagnosed with Pre-B, Standard Risk-High, Acute Lymphoblastic Leukemia, and because he had a "slow early response" to initial therapy he had to have slightly more aggressive chemotherapy than other Standard Risk kids. He achieved his first remission in April 2007 and completed three years and...
Our son, Ryan, was diagnosed in March of 2007 with Acute Lymphoblastic Leukemia at the age of 22 months. He is a strong little boy who has endured a lot; more than any child or adult should ever have to endure. His resilience, laughter and joyous attitude amaze us on a daily basis. He is a typical 6 year old boy who loves Legos, video games, Star Wars, animals, police cars, and firetrucks. He also loves being outdoors. He is a bright, loving and incredibly tough little kid!
Ryan was first diagnosed with Pre-B, Standard Risk-High, Acute Lymphoblastic Leukemia, and because he had a "slow early response" to initial therapy he had to have slightly more aggressive chemotherapy than other Standard Risk kids. He achieved his first remission in April 2007 and completed three years and four months of consecutive chemotherapy treatment on July 3rd, 2010. His frontline chemotherapy consisted of daily oral chemo meds, as well as intramuscular, intravenous and intraspinal injections of chemotherapy every few weeks/months.
Ten days after he had completed treatment, we learned on July 13th, 2010 that he had relapsed. Cytogenetic testing for his relapse diagnosis revealed that he had a t(1;19) translocation, which is a high risk genetic marker for leukemia. Ryan should have been treated on a high risk leukemia protocol from the start (instead of standard risk), but they weren't able to properly isolate and identify the translocation until relapse.
For relapse therapy, he was treated as a very high risk case, with a couple of rounds of extremely aggressive chemotherapy, which required several months of hospitalization. Unfortunately, he was not able to attain complete remission despite the high dose chemotherapy, but we decided to proceed with a bone marrow transplant anyway, because his leukemia was thought to have become chemotherapy resistant and the transplant was his only remaining chance for a cure. Ryan was classified as a high risk case for an additional relapse/treatment failure due to the fact that he still had so much residual leukemia going into transplant.
In order to prepare for the transplant, he had to endure "pre-conditioning treatment," which consisted of four days of Total Body Irradiation 2x/day under i.v. anesthesia each time and one day of ridiculously high dose chemotherapy, followed by his unrelated bone marrow transplant at City of Hope on November 16th, 2010. His donor was a perfect 10/10 match. Ryan spent an additional 45 consecutive days in the hospital during his transplant process, mostly in isolation. At 30 days post-transplant, he had no evidence of leukemia and today, nearly 15 months later, he is still leukemia free!!!!
Ryan continues to heal and is doing remarkably well! He is now enrolled in a regular kindergarten classroom setting, but requires a special aide to help keep him on task, because he has some long term cognitive side effects from all the treatment he endured. He is currently receiving Occupational, Speech and Physical Therapy services to help him catch up with his peers. However, socially, he is a bit of a butterfly and on par with his peers, despite being a bit shy. He was also able to play soccer this past fall, and it was the first time he's ever participated in organized sports. He is making tremendous progress each and every day.
Our family has learned to savor every moment together, through good times and bad. This will be our family's sixth year participating in the annual LAFD/LAPD St. Baldrick's event, and it is a very important part of our family's life. We look forward to it each and every year, and we are committed to raising funds for pediatric cancer research because we want to help find a cure for pediatric cancer within our lifetime, so that no child will be robbed of their innocence and childhood by cancer ever again. Without the tremendous strides made in pediatric leukemia research the past 30-40 years alone, our son would have never survived his diagnosis. We want to make this a reality for every child who is diagnosed with cancer and eventually help to not only find a cure, but also direct causes, prevention and less toxic treatment protocols.
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