Life or death: Girl in need of stem cell match Anne Hodgkinson and Paul Herron are living every parent’s worst nightmare. Again. When their daughter Katie Herron, now four years old, battled cancer as a toddler, the fight for the little girl’s health was a private, family affair. The youngster endured many months of cancer treatment and battled her way back to a healthy recovery. That all changed last November. The Cambridge family doesn’t worry about privacy anymore. They’re now telling everyone they know Katie’s acute lymphoblastic leukemia is back. Katie’s life depends on it. Although the type of cancer that has taken hold of her body usually has a high success rate of responding to treatment, the girl is among the small percentage of children who can’t beat the leukemia using standard treatment protocols. Katie’s only life-saving option now is to find a stem cell donor match. “We’ve got to find a match and we’ve go to find it soon,” explained an emotionally-raw Hodgkinson, as she paced the hallways of Hamilton’s McMaster Children’s Hospital, where Katie has lived since the fall. “We have to find a match. She is fighting for her life.” It’s hoped a stem cell match would help reboot Katie’s blood by essentially wiping out her white blood cells and replacing them with a matched transplant of healthy white blood cells. The procedure would enable her body to fight for itself. In desperation to save Katie’s life, Hodgkinson and Herron, who’s a Milton native and works for Halton Region’s public works department, have turned to the community to help find a match. A stem cell donor clinic has been set up for Saturday, Feb. 22 at the Cambridge Sports Park, 1001 Franklin Blvd., from 1 to 5 p.m. The stem cell donor drive requires a mere swab of the cheek to become registered with the One Match Stem Cell and Marrow Network. Although everyone is encouraged to become a registered stem cell donor, males between the ages of 17 and 35 are especially needed, as their stem cells have better results on patients post-transplant. Every night at the hospital, Hodgkinson goes to bed praying the next day will brings news of a match from the national registry database. It was thought that Herron was a possible match, but he was soon ruled out as a potential source. Hodgkinson and Herron are hopeful that a match will be found at the February 22 clinic for Katie or someone else. After a surgery this week, Katie is waiting to be stabilized before she’s moved to the Hospital for Sick Children in Toronto, where she’ll have the transplant surgery if a suitable donor is found. As hard as it may be to share their anguish with the rest of the world, Hodgkinson and Herron need to go public with their plea. “We’re not going to keep quiet this time. We’re going to be advocates.” The four-year-old has spent so much of her life in hospitals, she has become far too well versed in medical jargon for someone her age, noted her mother. Too well prepared for a painful procedure, Katie will sometimes ask medical staff not to poke and prod. Afterward, however, the well-mannered girl has been known to say, “That’s OK, I forgive you.” “She remembers her manners all the way through,” said Hodgkinson. What has upset Katie, a student at Coronation Public School, most was losing her locks of hair, which had finally grown long enough to suit her girly-girl zeal. “It all fit into a pony tail for the first time in her life,” said her mother. Just after Christmas, Katie finally agreed to shave what remained of those locks. But in keeping with her brave spirits, she decided on a wig — a pink one. “She is my little fighter,” said Hodgkinson. “She’s my hero.” For more information on the upcoming stem cell donor clinic, visit Katie’s Kure on Facebook.
Posted on: Thu, 30 Jan 2014 16:02:37 +0000
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