NOTE FROM THE MACS STAFF

Christian's story was written before he passed away. We will update his story as soon as we receive more information from his family.

Christian was born on March 29th, 2001 in Baytown, TX at 9lbs 15oz. He was a very healthy baby boy. He never had any problems, all of his doctors always told me that he was very well and active.

Well, it all started May 26, 2003, he was not acting right and wanting to sleep all of the time, so I took him to Clear Lake Hospital close to where we live and they said that he just had a virus and gave him some antibiotics. The antibiotics worked for three weeks and at this time I was due any day to have his baby sister so I really could not tell that anything was wrong.

On June 4th, 2003 he went to stay with his Grandma because I was due to go to the hospital at 6:00a.m, on June 5th, 2003 to have the baby. I was there for three days with baby sister Alexis. We got out of the hospital on June 8th, 2003, went home and waited for him to come home.

When he got home, my sister was there and she was very happy to see him so she picked him up and shifted him to her side by his legs, at about that time he said OUCH... and she did not know what had happened, all we could think of is that he had fell or something. The pain continued for a week and so I took him back to Clear Lake and they took blood, did x-rays and did not see anything but that his leg was inflamed so they gave us some medicine and it seemed to help a little but not much. My husband and I did not know whether it was for attention because of the new baby or what it was. Three weeks went by and I could not get him in to his doctors office so we ended back in the hospital.

Now they told me that he was dehydrated and it was making his bones hurt and making him nauseated. So we went home. Two days later my husband lost his job and we had to move in with a friend of ours. The vomiting and the pain got worse so we then took him back for more tests and they said he sprained his leg and that they had to put a cast on it. I was then very mad and told them that I did not think that was the problem!! But who am I to really know anything? Well, two days went by and we thought that we would try taking him to his favorite restaurant and see if he would eat and that did not work. When we got back home he was real warm so I took his temperature and it was 102.6 and I tried all the methods to get it to go down and they did not work, so my husband said lets take him to Texas Children's Hospital and by the time we got there his temperature. was 103.1 and I was devastated.

They ran a lot of tests and came and moved us to a private room and at about this time I am really scared. They came in and told us that they were admitting him and still wouldn't tell us why. Then the head nurse came in and told us that he had some type of Leukemia cells in his blood work, but they were not sure what it was yet. We were finally moved up to our room and my mom was there with us. We all stayed up the rest of the night because it was almost 4:00a.m. when we got to our room. He got a bone marrow tap at 1:00p.m. that same day. We finally got all the results at 7:00p.m. and it was Acute Lymphoblastic Leukemia. He started his first round of chemo. We were in the hospital for 8 days.

He had a port put in two weeks into treatment because his veins were so little. Now he does everything at the clinic and takes pills at home after his very long 73 day stay in the hospital. He likes to take the pill but he does not like to take anything in a syringe. We have met a lot of inspiring people at the hospital and clinic. We like Texas Children's a lot, it is interesting to hear all of the miracles that has happened to so many different people with so many different illnesses.

He now shows no cancer in his body! Please pray he will stay this way. We still have lots more chemo treatments to go.

(..... to be continued .....)