Around 5am a small team of hospital staff came into the room to get a blood sample to be sent off for further analysis. The plan was to take blood early in the day, have the samples sent offsite for study, and to receive results confirming what illness was present.
This day seemed to take forever. The staff was very nice and helpful in making sure Cristian was as comfortable as possible. Even so the waiting was excruciating with no way to speed up the process. Like any parent we were hoping for news that would somehow make it all go away with a false initial diagnosis or some other non-cancer illness. Unfortunately that news never came.
Late in the day we met with the oncology team who was assigned to help Cristian and they gave us the news. Cristian was diagnosed with Precursor B-Type Acute Lymphoblastic Leukemia. We discussed what this meant and what the path forward usually looks like.
The silver lining (is there such a thing in this situation) is that the specific type of leukemia Cristian has is the most common in children and also has the highest (+90%) survival rate when property treated.
Having done a little amount of research on the different types of leukemia during the day, we were somewhat prepared with questions and what to expect. The team was great in answering all of our questions and was actually able to provide a sense of calm or optimism about our new normal. They also discussed a couple clinical trials that were available for Cristian based on his circumstances, and asked us to review things to see if we were interested in participating.
Well now we knew the situation and were starting to see a plan come together. I won’t lie and say we felt good about the situation because that’s impossible. The next steps were to have 3 procedures the next day and start the “Induction” phase of treatment.
The 3 procedures Cristian is set to have are standard for starting treatment. These will help provide more information to dictators around how wide spread the leukemia is in his body, and make administering IV meds easier without having to place a bee IV each time.
- Bone marrow biopsy (hip bone)
- Spinal tap (spinal fluid sample)
- “Port” installation (right pectoral)
While the team performs the spinal tap they will also be injecting chemo directly into the spinal fluid as this is a typical location for leukemia cells to gather.
Team Cristian 