TITUS'S STORY
About Titus a.k.a. Ty Petersen:
Titus is 4 years old and is the son of Shauna and Chris. He has an older sister, Charlotte who is 6 years old.
Late November 2024, after Thanksgiving, we noticed Ty’s lymph nodes in his neck were swollen. It was the beginning of winter so we just figured he was fighting a cold of some kind. By the end of the week, they were still there so we took him to his primary care provider (PCP). They ran blood work and everything came back fine. They weren’t bothering him but seriously, they looked like marbles.
Doc told us to keep an eye on him and come back in a few weeks if they don’t go away. Of course, that landed on Christmas, so we went back on December 30th. No change, doc wanted us to continue to keep an eye on him and told us if we notice anything different or if he gets a fever to call immediately.
Early in January, Ty started snoring. I don’t mean cute little kid noises and deep breathing, I mean old man, sawing logs, sleep apnea, wake you up snoring. On January 17th, we went back to the doctor, we were all sure it was tonsils and adenoids. We were sent to see the ENT on January 28th.
Friday night, January 24th, Ty developed a low-grade fever. We reached out Saturday morning and his doctor wanted to see him right away Monday morning. She got us in 20 minutes before the clinic opened. Sunday, Shauna (aka Mom) tested positive with influenza. She is a teacher so just another day. Sunday night at bath time we noticed pinpoint like spotted bruising all over his body, we also noted the bruising on his legs although they are always bruised, it was much worse than normal.
Monday morning, I (Chris aka Dad) took Ty to the doctor. First the nurse came in and took vitals and looked him over. She noticed the bruising, looked at his tonsils and said, “I’ll be right back.” The door hardly shut and his Doc was looking him over. Within three minutes I had been told all the things that could cause this but Ty needed blood work immediately and we needed to get him downtown. The big red flags were the spotted bruising and his tonsils, which she described as hemorrhagic. After I asked what that means, I realized how serious things were getting. I asked the doctor to call my wife and relay everything she had told me and that we were on the way to pick her.
By 10:20am Monday we were admitted into Pediatric Intensive Care Unit (PICU) at Blank Children’s Hospital and diagnosed with T-Cell Leukemia (a rare but fairly treatable blood cancer) with a white blood cell count of 416,000. Of course, the first thing we did was open Google. Normal is between 5,000 and 19,000. Ty is now the record holder for the highest white blood cell counts ever recorded at Blank Children’s Hospital.
His WBC count was so high that his body stopped producing platelets to help blood clot. There simply wasn’t any more room. WBC and platelets are formed in bone marrow and 100% of his bone marrow was leukemia. We spent 4 days at Blank before being sent home to start our new “normal.”
By early February, Ty had stopped eating and we struggled to get him to take his oral steroids. We spent 6 days in the hospital because Ty had picked up a virus and was rejecting his food and medicine. Now he has an NG Tube which has been a life saver!
Since diagnosis, Ty has completed 3 separate phases of treatment. We have had numerous trips to the ER for fevers but throughout the whole journey, Ty has shown us just how strong he can be! Not even a broken arm with a cast can stop him! His numbers are trending in the right direction and treatments are working. We start delayed intensification at the end of July.