“My love as a mother saved my daughter’s life and mine.”
We can’t stress enough the importance of advocating for yourself and for your loved ones. In this case, mother Karla’s life was saved by her persistence of insisting doctors take a better look at her young daughter Hailey when she just knew that something wasn’t right. After years of being turned away and having her concerns belittled, it was discovered that both her daughter Hailey and herself had cancer.
Karla’s story blew us away. We wanted to help uplift this family however we could. Shortly after meeting them at another local foundation’s Christmas party, they became recipients of our Dyin 2 Live Dreams program. We sent the whole family to spend a day at the “happiest place on earth” to take a well deserved break from cancer.
We are so grateful to have met this beautiful family and so honored to share their story. We hope that you find strength to follow your intuition when you feel something is not right and to ask for a second, third, forth, even 100th opinion when it comes to your health along with your family’s.
Karla is an inspiration and she and her daughter are each other’s heroes. Karla has since beat breast cancer and Hailey awaits some more surgeries in the next few months.
Here is their story along with some words about their experience at Disneyland we were able to provide them. Keep this family close to your hearts and in your prayers as Hailey continues to fight.
“I am with tears of happiness and forever grateful for providing this opportunity and beautiful experience for our family.
The experience of forgetting our hardship and our very difficult year. Mother and daughter both discovering we have cancer, our surgeries and mental struggles and having to deal with our new normal life. It’s difficult having to be brave and so strong all the time, but you helped us forget and enjoy a very happy and magical day.
Thank you so much Fuck Cancer.
Our story begins when Hailey was a baby just one year after I had my son. As they both grew up, I noticed some changes in my daughter how she walked and how she ran aside her younger brother. By the age of 3, I noticed the changes of her legs and how they would wobble. The doctors told me she was lazy and just ate to many cookies. So then I proceeded to change doctors and by the age of 4 she had a cyst by her armpit. Within six weeks it grew we did not want to take any risks of the cyst to be cancerous. We agreed for my baby’s first surgery unbeknownst that it would be just 1 of many more to come. By the age of 6, I had spent years finding and changing doctors until I found one that believed in my pain as a mother. By the age of 7 we got in children’s hospital and by the first year she got a in with neurology which focused on her nerves, back and legs. The doctors realized she was weak in her legs and hips.
That year we started of by arranging a team of doctors and by age 8 we knew something else was wrong. She was not improving so they recommended a genetic testing for mother and father. It came back positive for cowdren syndrome/ also p10 and I, her mother, discovered I was the carrier. A genetic disorder that is a carrier of multiple carcinomas cancerous and non cancerous tumors. Immediately Children’s hospital connected me with USC KECK HOSPITAL and started screening. In two years I went through serious biopsies for my uterus and breast and found cancer in both. My daughter was also diagnosed with thyroid cancer. Hailey has congenital myopathy which is muscle weakness in legs and knees, severe scoliosis and flat feet distorted. I would have never found these issues if it wasn’t for my love and perseverance that I had for my baby girl. My love as a mother saved her life and mine. What was never done for me as a child I did her.”