Madyn was the happiest kid.
She was the easiest baby. She was always smiling.
Never even had so much as an ear infection.
We took Madyn in for her
routine eighteen-month well-baby checkup at her pediatrician.
Madyn's blood work came back and we got a call from the pediatrician in the middle of the
afternoon said come straight down to the office and I said
you cant tell me over the phone? And she said absolutely not.
There was 10 possibilities, nine of them being
not a huge deal, the tenth being cancer.
and I talked to my wife and tried to
think that it's gonna be one of these one through nine, not 10.
And that's when she let us know that the blood work was
very abnormal and she wanted us to talk to
an oncologist.
We were terrified.
We sat on the side of the building outside
the pediatrician's office and cried.
I hoped it was a virus but I think in my heart I knew
it wasn't.
I was just sick.
I was shaking.
I was so nervous.
We made a comment that we had never actually been to Valley Children's.
Our kids were happy and healthy.
Our friends' kids were happy and healthy.
We had never really seen the inside of the Hospital.
I remember Dr. Ozeran came in and introduced himself.
There was initially a lot of kind of shocked silence
and more than a few tears.
So we see anywhere between 120 and 140 new cases
of cancer per year here in the Valley which is actually a lot when you look at
national averages, we're about at the 87th percentile for number of patients seen.
When Dr. Ozeran diagnosed her with acute lymphoblastic leukemia
we immediately
got into fight mode.
I had heard of leukemia, but honestly I knew it was cancer,
and based on previous experiences,
I wasn't hopeful in that moment.
And Dr. Ozeran
sat us down and said we treat kids like Madyn all the time
I have every hope
that she's gonna be ok if you trust me to take care of her.
And my husband and I looked at each other and said "let's go."
Even within a couple of weeks, she was a lot more involved. She was a lot
more expressive. She was a lot more herself.
And I think that's something probably
Jeremy and Ashlei can tell you is that Madyn was really back to being herself
pretty quickly.
First, she's cute.
Not that all our kids aren't cute, they're all really cute, and she's very friendly
kind of took to us and it became a kind of a competition amongst the physicians you
know who's going to be her best friend and so I tried to steal every time I get
every chance I get.
We don't have a cure obviously, but they have a treatment plan set in place that,
if followed, you have a 90-93 percent chance of survival.
By now Madyn had nearly two and a half years of treatment at Valley Children's
and it was October 2013.
She had her last bone marrow biopsy.
It was clear and the doctors congratulated
us and said no more chemo Madyn, you did it.
And it was the best of my life.
It takes a special person be an oncologist
and then to add how well they are with the kids is there's only a handful of
people in this world that can do that and Valley Children's has them.
I don't think
think I can ever thank the oncologists enough for saving my baby so I want to
give back to them in any way that we can so no other parent hopefully in the
future has to go through what we did.
And that's what's amazing about her
is she's just ready to live now
She's ready to grow up.