Ariely Collazo: I discovered Amanda had Leukemia, when she was one and a half years of age. Her glands behind her head were swollen and her spleen and her liver were also swollen.
Sally Hageman: Well, Acute Lymphocytic Leukemia is, one of the ways you find it is, the child has become very tired and you draw her count and her white count will be very high and they won’t be the normal cells.
Dr. Laura Pirich: Patients can have fatigue, fever or pallor or bruising or particularly, lymph node enlargement or enlargement of their liver spleen.
Julia O’Malley: When any child comes to Childrens’ to get chemotherapy or any sort of medication, they first go through the clinic, have their lab work and all that done. If once they are okay to come in, they come to the day hospital where they get hooked up to fluids such as this with IV tubing that goes through a pump that monitors all the fluid that they get. Most of our patients have a central line or an IV of some sorts that’s kind of a permanent thing until they’re done with their therapy. On this little guy, you can see that he has a little venus part, which is accessed everytime he comes into clinic. Once he is done with therapy, the line is taken care of and it’s -- the needle comes out or he can play and swim and do everything that he would do as a normal kid would, but this is just used only for his therapy, which kind of makes things a little bit less dramatic in a really stressful dramatic time.
Sally Hageman: This little girl won’t let her mom leave the side and if mom needs a break, I’ll need to work on a report with her so that she can trust me. Even now, from this morning when I went to look at her lung, she started to cry and get upset, now she was even a little bit more comfortable and the more I am with her in a very non-threatening way, the easier it will be.
Ariely Collazo: With all this, the trust that I having got, I though that she was going to be okay, and she has come to Childrens’ and she is doing very well.
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