Angela Moore: My name is Angela Moore and this is my son Jonathan Moore. He is three years old and he has ALL.
Dr. Laura Pirich: ALL is the most common type of pediatric cancer that we see; it is Acute Lymphoblastic Leukemia, which is a cancer of the blood in bone marrow.
Angela Moore: I found out in the emergency room and I just say still for about an hour till a time that sunk in and I decided -- I headed learn all I needed to know about it.
Dr. Laura Pirich: Although it’s a most common cancer that we see in kids, it’s not a very common disease, so I don’t know that parents would necessarily think that their child has Leukemia, they would think that their child has a problem such as being pale or having bruising and they would take their child to a physician and we often times will make the diagnoses or know that there is a problem by doing a CBC, which is a blood test. What we believe happens is one of the blood cells, one of the early blood cells in the bone marrow, it becomes abnormal for some reason and instead of that cell dying as it should be because it’s abnormal, it continues to divide and grow and so what starts out as one abnormal cell ends up being millions of abnormal cells.
Angela Moore: When he comes to the hospital, he gets a liquid chemotherapy for four hours, and then we stay 48 hours to make sure that everything is good, then we go home and we get chemo every night.
Dr. Laura Pirich: The survival rates for children are very high and close to 80% long-term survival. So although 20 years ago or 30 years ago, it was a difficult disease to cure, we now have made many, many strides in curing the majority of kids who have Acute Lymphoblastic Leukemia.
Angela Moore: Hang in there if he gets better and more you know the better it is, learn all you can. If you have a positive attitude, he’ll have a positive attitude.
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