The Diagnosis

Juliana is a strong, independent 14-year-old girl. She loves wrestling and spending time with family and friends. She excels in her schoolwork to earn a 4.0 GPA. After winter break, Juliana was cutting weight for wrestling. She started losing energy and was more pale, but this was initially thought to be from her weight fluctuations with wrestling season. The symptoms would improve after meets, but she would return as she prepared for the next meet. On Tuesday, January 14th, she struggled to warm up at night and had a below-normal temperature. On Wednesday, she had a headache and still felt cold, so we had her come home from school to rest. She returned to school Thursday and competed in her last meet of the season. Her symptoms worsened; she looked pale, had little energy, and broke down crying during her 2nd match. She said she didn’t feel like herself and didn’t know what was wrong.

We took Juliana to the Jones County Medical Center the following day. They did some blood work. Based on those, they did more labs on Monday. The doctor called Wednesday night with the results and wanted us to go to U of I to investigate further with a pediatric oncologist. The U of Iowa did some of the same labs to verify the results. By Thursday morning, the final lab diagnosed Juliana with acute myeloid leukemia (cancer of the blood).

There's nothing she did that caused this; it's just a chance of mutation of cells. We don't have all the answers.