September is Childhoos Cancer Awareness Month

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Did you know that September is Childhood Cancer Awareness month?  Do you know of a child that has or has had childhood cancer?  I am a mother whose son fought hard for just about 1 year from a rare form of childhood cancer.  My son DaNNY (that is how he spelled his name) was diagnosed with High Risk Acute Myeloid Leukemia FLT3-ITD on July 17, 2009.  The only symptoms that he had was brusing and piechtia (spelling).  He spent 142 days in Sioux Falls SD at the Childrens hospital going through 3 rounds of intense Chemotherapy with nothing touching his cancer.  On December 6th we were transferred up to the U of MN children's hospital and stayed at the Ronald McDonald House from December 6th until July 1 2010.  He did a phase 1 drug study for a new cancer drug for leukemia patient.  There were only 6 AML leukemia patients that were picked for this study. 2 of them passed away while on the study, 2 did not fair well and our son DaNNY and a friend that we met at Sioux Falls did wonderfully on the drug.  They were able to get down to 4% leukemia cells in his body.  He had a bone marrow transplant on April 2nd.  Good friday.  He was at the Ronnie McDonald house from December 6th until he was admitted into the hosptial on March 18th 1 week before he was suppose to.   He had a double umbilical cord blood transplant.  He did wonderfully, but then on June 18th started to cough up blood and needed oxygen.  We were admitted into the PICU and he was intubated.  we found out a couple days later that his heart was not working  He had 2 pericardial effusions and had them both tapped.  The doctors did a heart cath lab on him and the pressures in side of his heart were really bad.  He was not critical until June 30th at Noon.  He passed away at 9pm on June 30th.  Please let me know what you know about childhood cancer.  We need to get awareness out there.