At Roswell Park, he enrolled on a clinical trial evaluating a drug combination that would later become known as “7 and 3,” for the dosing schedule of two drugs — seven days of cytarabine followed by three days of daunorubicin.
Leukemia
To help Dr. Griffiths' patients understand myelodysplastic syndromes (MDS), she typically starts by telling them to think of their blood as a grocery store and their bone marrow as a farm.
When she was almost 11, Kayla was mysteriously sick for two months. First her doctors thought she had a cold or mono, and then a stomach bug. Her blood work showed that her white blood cell count was through the roof.
Twelve-year-old Emmett is big into hockey. He started skating when he was 4 and playing when he was 6. He had hockey hair. He skateboarded. He was outside playing sports every minute he could. Then when he was 10, he started to feel lightheaded and fatigued.
The advice I would give to other people going through cancer at my age is to never give up. Find something that can symbolize your journey and push you to keep fighting.
Nobody expects to hear the words “Your child has cancer.” Nobody is prepared. And in our family’s case, our son Emmett was diagnosed with leukemia in an emergency room, and treatment began that day in the ICU. We had no time at all to prepare, or even to comprehend it all at the time.
The fact that you live in a particular country or community should not impact your ability to get good care for cancer.
Because of AML’s aggressive nature, it traditionally requires aggressive—and immediate—treatment that involves intensive, high-dose chemotherapy and many weeks in the hospital. For older patients, however, such grueling treatment isn’t always promising, and many are mistakenly advised that their time and options are limited.
My son, David, was 13 years old when he was diagnosed with acute lymphoblastic leukemia (ALL). My husband and I are both medical professionals, and cancer never entered our minds when David exhibited signs of fatigue, sore throat and listlessness.
When Ian Cherico was rushed to the hospital, he was in a fight for his life. “Minutes later and I could have died,” he says. Ian was only 17 years old at the time, and his body was shutting down. It all started with a headache he couldn’t shake.
When Dr. Donald Pinkel graduated from medical school at the University of Buffalo in 1951, the world was a pretty dark place for kids with acute lymphoblastic leukemia (ALL). They didn’t live long after diagnosis, and experts in the field of blood cancer were convinced the disease was incurable.
People with Down syndrome have an increased risk of developing very specific types of childhood leukemia, but Eugene Yu, PhD, has an additional reason to focus on the genetic mysteries of Down syndrome.