An unexpected diagnosis
At 2:30 in the morning, however, Spencer woke up, screaming in pain. His mother, Jillian, rushed him to Connecticut Children’s Emergency Department, where emergency medicine physician Steven Rogers, MD, assessed Spencer and provided medication to ease his pain. Dr. Rogers stayed after his shift to check on them, even going across the street to get Jillian a coffee from Starbucks. “I will never ever be able to explain what that meant to me,” Jillian said.
When Spencer’s MRI and bloodwork were complete, an oncologist met Jillian downstairs. The news was worse than expected: Spencer had leukemia. They also now had an answer to why Spencer was unable to walk without pain. The MRI showed that lesions had formed inside his thigh bone and caused a fracture. The next day, Spencer underwent surgery to place a chemotherapy port in his chest and had his first spinal tap to remove a sample of cerebrospinal fluid. Two days later, he was back in surgery where orthopedic surgeon Sonia Chaudhry, MD, placed two pins in his leg to stabilize the fracture to allow the bone to heal.
Now the long and arduous chemotherapy treatment for leukemia could begin, under the care of hematologist/oncologist Natalie Bezler, MD. Between February and December, Spencer and Jillian were home for only a handful of weeks. During chemotherapy, Spencer was unable to walk, talk or feed himself. “I lived in the hospital with him,” Jillian said. That left Spencer’s father juggling the responsibilities of running a construction business and caring for their two older children, who were five and six years old at the time. “Our world kind of just got flipped upside down,” added Jillian.
The initial rounds of chemotherapy made Spencer very sick, landing him in the pediatric intensive care unit (PICU) several times. He was also frequently sick during the outpatient maintenance rounds of chemotherapy, which lasted for more than a year.
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