On February 22, 2011, our 2½-year-old Abigail just stopped walking. We were baffled and took her to the pediatrician who sent us to the hospital to have her tested for a joint infection. After several hours at the ER, she was diagnosed with acute lymphoblastic leukemia (ALL). That was not what we had expected, and we worried about her identical twin as well. Eight months into Abigail’s treatment, in October of 2011, her identical twin Natasha was also diagnosed with ALL.
Our twin girls fought together for two years mostly rotating who was in the hospital except for one week when they fought side by side in their hospital room. We had multiple ICU visits, and it was fairly common to find one or both of my girls running around attached to an oxygen concentrator. By the start of 2014, both of our 5-year-old twins had finished chemotherapy and began to flourish. We were told that at five years our girls were cured. We celebrated both of those five-year dates and thought the cancer was far behind our healthy girls.
However, after a month of random illnesses in November of 2021, we noticed that Natasha was incredibly pale. Having seen this once before, we rushed her to the ER to receive the diagnosis of leukemia relapse after eight years! She was 13. We started with CAR-T treatment, but when that failed to work, she had a bone marrow transplant on September 14, 2022. There were many challenges and a long ICU stay as she fought through the effects of the transplant. We brought her home on Halloween day only to take her back three weeks later due to a pericardial effusion. Natasha began to eat and started becoming mobile again. Her spirits were high, and we expected she would only improve. Then she started having problems breathing, and the steroids prescribed did not take effect as expected. It took some time, but Natasha was eventually diagnosed with graft vs. host disease (GVHD) in her lungs. She fought hard for the next few months as she went on a roller coaster of better and worse until she finally passed away on June 23, 2023, shortly after her 15th birthday. Natasha’s identical twin Abigail is healthy with no known side effects of her earlier cancer journey.
Kim
Parent and Caregiver
