Name: The Story of Elaina
Uploaded: 2024-05-31T09:08:45.000Z
Duration: 4 min 27 s
Description: Thousands of YouTube videos with English-Chinese subtitles! Now you can learn to understand native speakers, expand your vocabulary, and improve your pronunciation...

Adverbs of degree

When the doctor called, you know, it was a regular morning for us. You know, Elena was running around, you know, the kids were playing, Nick was home. It was just like a typical morning and around 10.30 the doctor called and she said, you know, we got her blood work back and it looks like it's leukemia.

Future continuous

I just lost my breath and she said, I'm sorry, you know, and she says, we need you to pack your bags, go straight to Children's Mercy Hospital. They'll be waiting for you guys and expect to stay there for a week. I was not expecting to hear those words. You know, we think it's leukemia.

So yeah, that's the day our world changed.

So Elena came to us when she was four and a half years old and she is of Cuban and El Salvadorian ancestry and she was diagnosed with what is called pre-B acute lymphoblastic leukemia and it is a cancer of the bone marrow. We know because of her genetic makeup and her ethnic background that she would respond differently to the standard protocols that were out there. Dr. Flatt knew that up front. We don't understand the genetics in Hispanic cancer very well and the reason we don't understand it very well is because when you look at clinical trials, meaning the studies that we place patients on from 2011 to 2018, the participants was 87% white and 8% Hispanic and that includes adults.

She hit neutropenia way too often. That's when it got very scary because you're seriously looking at a life-and-death situation. She had a mutation that we know happens more frequently in Hispanics, but our dilemma is what do we do with that because there's no clinical trial written about that and unfortunately there would be nothing else to do with her therapy. She was already as intense as we could go with her therapy and that was really the only option. There was no other option really for her. That's what makes Elena's case difficult and she represents many many Hispanic children.

 Elena's status today is she is in remission. She is seven months post treatment. Her physical exam checked out fine and you know she is back to being herself and energy and lots of energy. Her energy has definitely come back. It's bittersweet because you know on one hand yes we're in a place that you know she doesn't have bad cells attacking her body anymore, but you're still in that kind of unknown period of time. Sometimes walk into these appointments every month you know like a grip around my heart and not being able to breathe until I see those numbers. The biggest risk that Elena is gonna face is that this disease has a pretty high chance of coming back. When you see these disparities of 99% of white children essentially today with standard risk leukemia will likely be cured, but that number is still somewhere around 85 or 87 for a Hispanic child. You see this disparity right and you say wow what what could we do? Pediatric research is is so important for so many people in that although we've come a long ways and the research and the treatments and the outcomes are so much better we still have so much farther to go.