Alyssa Sandmeier
Alyssa’s Story
By: Alyssa’s mother, Jill Sandmeier
At the beginning of June 2005, I started noticing four-year-old Alyssa’s energy and appetite waning. I figured she was a tad depressed, as we had just moved to Grand Island, Nebraska from New York and her daddy was attending school 2 ½ hours away, in Omaha. I was about to make her an appointment with a child psychologist when the fevers started. Every ten days, Alyssa would get a fever that would last for three days, sometimes accompanied by vomiting. The doctor told us it was a virus on two separate occasions, but on our third visit to the doctor in a month, I requested a blood test. When the doctor came back into the exam room, she informed me that there were some “interesting” findings from the blood test, and that I needed to take Alyssa to Omaha immediately. My parents immediately left work and drove Alyssa, Jacob (my then-two-year-old son), and me to meet with a pediatric hematology oncologist that afternoon.
Alyssa was diagnosed with acute lymphoblastic leukemia on June 30, 2005. We were admitted right away and other testing was ordered. Chemotherapy started on July 3rd, and Alyssa received her first blood product on July 4th, 2005. We joked that between the packed red cells, the white hospital sheets, and the blue jammies, she was the most patriotic patient on the floor! One thing I remember about that first transfusion is how much it helped Alyssa. I guess I hadn’t noticed how low her energy level was and how pale her complexion had gotten until after her transfusion. I could tell that her lips were red, her cheeks were pink, and she got out of bed for the first time in four days! It was almost the difference between day and night. That transfusion turned her into a regular kid again.
Alyssa reached remission within 29 days, and her treatment was planned for 28 months of daily chemo, weekly chemo, monthly chemo, monthly spinal taps, and quarterly bone marrow biopsies. During this time, Alyssa continued to receive blood products whenever the chemo overpowered her body’s ability to make its own cells. We felt very fortunate to always have blood available when she needed it.
Eleven days before Alyssa was to take her last daily chemo pill, I took her to the emergency room because of back pain. My husband is a medical technologist, and was working the night we were in the ER. He came to tell me that he had seen “suspicious” cells in her blood work and that he was going to ask the pathologist to look at it first thing in the morning. We called the next day, and they asked us to come in so they could get some blood work to look at themselves. Later that day, on September 26th, 2007, Alyssa was diagnosed with a relapse of her cancer.
This time around, we’ve definitely had more blood and platelet transfusions than we did the first time. We’ve spent about 85 of the last 135 days in the hospital for chemo, radiation, blood transfusions, and a bone marrow transplant. My daughter has been the sickest I’ve ever seen ANYONE. And as hard as it was for me to see her that way, I had to remember that it was harder for her to feel that way. Thankfully, she was on such a combination of 15-20 different drugs that she doesn’t remember most of the time she spent in the hospital. That was an answer to prayers, as I didn’t want the terrible days staying with her for the rest of her life.
At one point, Alyssa was getting a transfusion daily, and once, she got platelets in the morning and at night on the same day. And what’s crazy is that we were told Alyssa had an easier time through this process than most patients! I don’t know what we would have done if there had been a blood shortage.
We can not take for granted what other people have done for us – people we’ll never meet, people who will never know that they saved the life of a six-year-old who wants to be a veterinarian who marries a farmer (so she can be the doctor for her husband’s animals). And since I have no names or faces to attach to the countless bags of blood product my daughter received, I’ll just assume it was you…or you…or you. I gave her life once, but blood donors give life each time they sit down in that chair. Thank you, from the bottom of this mother’s heart.