Friday night, my sister took her 4-year-old, my niece Katie, to an urgent care clinic because she didn’t think the family doctor’s diagnosis of a respiratory infection a few days earlier was correct. My niece had developed some scary swelling in her face and upper chest, and said she couldn’t breathe if she was laying down, so my sister spent all of Thursday night in a chair with her daughter sitting in her lap so she could sleep.
Katie stopped breathing at the urgent care clinic. Luckily it was directly across the street from an emergency room, and they rushed her over there and got her resuscitated. Then she stopped breathing again. They brought her back again, and life-flighted her to the children’s hospital in Tacoma. By the time they got her there, her breathing was so poor that they decided to intubate her.
But Katie’s a fighter, and she fought so hard that 5 adults couldn’t hold her still enough to be intubated before they finally gave up and sedated her first. They did an MRI and found that she has an enlarged heart, as well as a cancerous mass around her heart, which apparently had been depressing her lungs enough to cause the breathing problems. The doctors told my sister they’d never seen a mass in that location so large in a child that size. Finally, they ran blood tests which returned an initial diagnosis of leukemia, and started her on chemotherapy.
Saturday they did a bone marrow test to further refine the diagnosis, and it confirmed the earlier tests. They decided to keep her sedated, in a medically-induced coma, until she no longer needs to be intubated. They continued the chemo, which started improving her blood counts immediately, but not anywhere near close enough to be hopeful. By Sunday night, the doctors told my sister that Katie had to have radiation or there was little chance she’d survive another day, but that the dosage necessary to improve the situation left Katie at very high risk of future cancer. Of course my sister told them to do whatever was necessary to save her.
She’s still in the coma, still intubated, and there’s a good chance she’ll be in the hospital for a month or so for the initial treatments, with a likelihood that she’ll have to have upwards of 2 years of chemotherapy. They’ll take her off the ventilator (and the sedation) as soon as her blood oxygen improves. At this point, they’re not even 100% certain that she hasn’t suffered some impact from oxygen deprivation on Friday night. The only hopeful sign is that today when they changed the IV lines (and so the sedation was slightly lifted), my sister was talking to her and squeezing Katie’s hand, and Katie squeezed back.
At this point, we just don’t know anything more. Every good sign seems to be countered with a bad sign. I asked if they’d given my sister any long-term prognosis, and they haven’t. My sister and my mom are the kind of people who wouldn’t want to know, anyway, unless they could hear that there’s a 100% chance of everything turning out just fine. And of course there’s not a 100% chance.
My sister has two other daughters, who are 10 and 19. The eldest just got married and is expecting a baby in November. Luckily she’s being a real trouper and taking charge of her 10-year-old sister at home while their mom stays at the hospital with the youngest. Both grandmothers are in the area, helping with meals and laundry and such. There’s really nothing I can do to help, except to pray, which I’m doing.
It will be a very long time before Katie is out of danger. At this point, we don’t even know how certain it is that she’ll reach her fifth birthday, which is in 7 weeks. Hopefully she’s enough of a fighter.
