This is a prayer page and a way to keep everyone up on her long road back to health. Ashleigh, a 19 year old beautiful young lady (my daughter), was complaining of her left knee hurting and figured it was tendinitis like she had a few years ago in her right leg. As time went on (a couple months) she started limping and there was visible swelling in her knee area. She went to our family doctor who sent her for an x-ray and signed her up for physical therapy. The day after her x-ray, we received a call that they found a mass on her knee and they wanted her to get an MRI completed. The day after the MRI we received a call from her doctor telling us that her and the radiologist that looked at the MRI felt she needed to see a Ortho Oncologist because the mass shown on the MRI was a 6" tumor that appeared to be bone cancer. The next Monday, 8/19, we were sitting in the Ortho Oncologist office getting a needle biopsy and receiving the most terrible news a child and parent can hear. The biopsy came back as a high-grade Osteosarcoma. We were told this cancer is extremely rare and would take about a year of chemo and surgeries before she would be better. He sent us immediately over to get a CT scan of her lungs and later called us saying there were several spots found on both of her lungs but they were small and felt that they could be from a bacteria many people have living in the Ohio valley. He set her up with an appt. at Nationwide Children's with an Oncologist that specializes in this disease. When we arrived at the hospital, she received an EKG, then we met with her Dr. who proceeded to tell us everything Ashleigh would have to endure over the next year. She would need surgery to put a port in her body. Her chemo would be administered during 4 days a week hospital stays. Over the next 10 weeks, she would be in the hospital 6 of those weeks. She would then need a limb salvage surgery to remove the tumor / bone in her leg and a prosthesis place in the removed bones spot. She would then have to continue another 20 weeks with more chemo..... Once the tumor was out, they would test it and if the tumor was 90% or more dead the same chemo meds that she had the first 10 weeks would be administered. If the tumor was less than 90% dead, they would need to add two more chemo meds to the regimen. We then went for a PET scan to make sure the cancer wasn't anywhere else in her body then we went home to let everything we just learned sink in. Her doctor called that night telling us the good news was nothing else showed up on the PET scan, but the bad news was that he finally had a chance to look at the CT scan of her lungs and he felt we really needed to get the nodules biopsied because he was afraid the nodules were disease vs. the bacterial that most people have. He said they could do the biopsy at the same time they put the port in. At this point, we were still optimistic that the doc was wrong. We were having a hard time believing our daughter had bone cancer much less stage IV cancer.......
The next week, we were checking her in for surgery, we walked her back to the OR fighting back tears. Two hours later, we were sitting in a small room with her surgeon and she was telling us that the nodules in her lungs were indeed cancer. She was stage IV......... It's still hard for me to say let along put in black and white. After she healed a couple days from her surgery and after she was able to get her chest tube out, they moved her to the cancer floor and started Chemo that night (September 7th at 9:24PM) I will never forget it. The chemo made her terribly sick and they kept her sedated as much as possible. 4 days later, she was released from the hospital and sent home for 2 weeks. During that time, she had to get blood work pulled twice a week to watch her white and red blood counts and platelets. Her ANC counts dropped to 0 and she got a fever and ended up back at the hospital in the middle of the 2 week break.
10/16 - we just finished with three weeks in a row of chemo and looking forward to 2 weeks off at home.
4/5/16 - Ashleigh's cancer is back and very mad. She has a very large tumor on the outside of her left lung touching one of her main arteries and her spine. She also has a small tumor on her right lung. They are starting high dose chemo again to try to shrink it enough to do surgery to remove the large tumor to prolong Ashleigh's life now.
4/28 - Ashleigh's CT scan came back and the tumor is continuing to grow and there is another small tumor that just showed up on the right lung. The doctor said to focus on Ashleigh's Bucket List. After discussing our options with the doctor, Ashleigh decided to try hitting it hard again with a chemo they would normally use for pancreatic cancer and possibly radiation. The radiation may cause more damage to her heart and damage her esophagus which would mean she would need a feeding tube. As of today, we have an appt with her radiologist on Wed. the 18th and she has already had two weeks of the new chemo.
