WACO, Texas — When someone you love gets diagnosed with cancer, it’s heartbreaking, especially when it is your child.
“It was very devastating," Gunner’s mother Marla Zickefoose said.
"We were at the hospital here in Waco,
"The emergency room doctor came in and said your son has cancer,”
Marla Zickefoose’s youngest child Gunner was diagnosed with leukemia in 2014.
He was only 7 years old.
“Pediatric cancer is exceptionally rare, 1 in 285 will be diagnosed with cancer before they’re 20,” BS&W McLane Children’s Hospital Pediatric Hematologist Oncologist Nicolas McGregor said.
“I never wanted him to see me scared because I knew if I could stay strong for him... then he would be strong fighting,” Zickefoose said.
Gunner went through several years with cycles of daily chemo treatments and relapsed multiple times.
“It was difficult when I got the call from the doctor saying he ‘It's back’ and I really was afraid," Zickefoose said.
"How am I going to tell him this and how will you take it."
Despite constant trips to hospitals, being pulled out of public school for his health, and all the pain.
“His response was I beat it two times before, I’m going to do it again, let’s do this,” Zickefoose said.
Thanks to the support of his family, community, and several others along his journey - now 15-year-old Gunner is back in school and doing just fine.
“After the transplant and to know that his bone marrow had in grafted and that he was healthy: To see the pride on his face to accomplish what he said out to do was just amazing,” Zickefoose said.
September is Pediatric Cancer awareness month.
Zickefoose says it is a time to support those families in need, learn more about forms of pediatric cancer and test your children to detect it early and together we can beat cancer.
“I just want people to know that childhood cancer is not rare as everyone seems to think that it is," Zickefoose said.
"It is going to take more than moms doing lemonade stands and people shaving their heads to raise the funds that we need to further treatments, ones so our kids do not go through such harsher treatments,”
Common signs of cancer are unusual lumps or swelling, limping and frequent headaches followed by vomiting.
Leukemia is the most common form of cancer among children.
