Karalyne's Fight Against Leukemia!

On February 11, 2018, our lives changed forever when our (then) 10 1/2 week old baby girl (who is now 4 months old) was diagnosed with Infant Acute Myeloid Leukemia (AML). We spent the first week of treatment in the ICU working to get Karalyne in a stable position for treatment. After various attempts to get medicine in her with nothing working (due to her condition at the time), one of our doctors looked us both in the eye and said "your daughter may die". Aside from hearing her initial diagnosis, those were the hardest words we have ever heard. Our daughter did not die though, and she made it through the first round of chemotherapy with no evidence of disease. She is an amazing little girl and we are so proud of her every day! In the days following our start of treatment, we learned that her AML also had MLL Rearrangement and a FLT3 mutation, both of which make her already aggressive cancer even more aggressive. We were told that even with chemo and no evidence of disease, she would not survive this without a bone marrow transplant. Her cancer is so aggressive, it will come back. We are now finishing up round 2 of her chemotherapy and preparing to go to transplant in May 2018. We have an amazing and highly motivated donor who has agreed to our time frame and has no restrictions. We are awaiting all of the final confirmatory blood work for typing and infectious disease, but everything has come back good so far.

We are hopeful that a bone marrow transplant will fully cure Karalyne of this cancer so that she can go on to live a happy life with us and her 6 brothers and sisters. If you would like to follow regular updates on Karalyne's progress, please follow our caring bridge site linked below.
https://www.caringbridge.org/visit/karalynesahady