Nurse's Son Battles Leukemia
- Janice Post-White is a cancer nurse and she had trouble spotting her son Brennan’s leukemia signs when he was four years old. Today, he’s over 25 years cancer-free.
- Brennan’s leukemia symptoms included leg pain, fevers, and abdominal pain.
- His diagnosis was the result of a bone marrow biopsy after his pediatrician initially could find nothing wrong with him.
Her son Brennan battled leukemia over 25 years ago. Today, he is a survivor. He was just four years old when he was diagnosed. Post-White and her family live in Minneapolis, Minnesota, and Lana'i, Hawaii.
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Post-White’s Son Brennan’s Leukemia Battle
In an essay penned for The Huffington Post titled “I’m A Cancer Nurse, But I Didn’t Spot My Own Son’s Cancer. Here’s What I Wish I’d Known,” Post-White dives deep into her story and explains how she missed her son Brennan’s cancer signs.“We didn't know then that his hemoglobin was half of what it should have been, and there wasn't enough oxygen to feed his muscles.”
Brennan, 4, and his parents were told that it usually takes two months to diagnose leukemia in children. Post-White writes that “I chided myself at 2 a.m.” because, as a cancer nurse for 15 years, she says, “I should have seen the signs.”
Brennan’s earliest symptoms included leg pains that began a few months before his diagnosis. He also experienced fevers and abdominal pain. But Brennan’s pediatrician couldn’t find anything wrong with him. At Christmas, his physical symptoms presented even more fully which led to a diagnosis in January. His mom writes, “We didn't know then that his hemoglobin was half of what it should have been, and there wasn't enough oxygen to feed his muscles.”
She writes, “Brennan's leukemia took two months and nine days to progress to the point where it could be detected in a routine blood test. This didn't affect his prognosis. But waiting one more day might have, and it would have put him in a higher risk category, requiring even more aggressive treatment.”
Brennan’s specific diagnosis was acute lymphoblastic leukemia (ALL) and it was confirmed via a bone marrow biopsy. Her son was enrolled in a clinical trial “with 2,000 other children, a central line port-a-cath was surgically placed to inject chemotherapy, and he started induction therapy, the first phase of what would be 38 months of treatment.”
Today, he’s been cancer-free for over 25 years. Post-White concludes her essay by writing, “Twenty-five years to the week after his diagnosis, my son, now six and a half feet tall, sat next to me at a local indie bookstore for my first book signing of Standing at Water's Edge: A Cancer Nurse, Her Four-Year-Old Son and the Shifting Tides of Leukemia.
She continues, “Brennan told the audience his takeaway from our story: No matter how prepared you think you are, you can never be prepared emotionally. Knowledge alone won't get you through.”
Bone Marrow Biopsies 'A Vital Part of Diagnosing’
Understanding Leukemia
Dr. Nina Shah, a SurvivorNet adviser and hematologist at the University of California San Francisco, explains in an earlier interview how to best understand leukemia. "One cell got really selfish and decided that it needed to take up all the resources of everybody else, and in doing so, took up space and energy from the rest of the body," Dr. Shah says.
"In general having a blood cancer means that your bone marrow is not functioning correctly," she explains. "And when your bone marrow doesn't function correctly it means that you can have something happen to you like anemia. Or you can have low platelets, which makes it possible for you to bleed easily. Or your immune system is not functioning correctly."
What is a Blood Cancer How is it Different?
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