Ariana’s Diagnosis of Leukemia

Before we get to Ariana’s diagnosis, I want to first set the timeline to about a month and a half back as we were moving to the Dallas area.

A lot of people have asked us over the past few months… why the Dallas area? And it’s because we wanted the best possible education and community for Ariana to thrive in as she got older.

We moved from Austin to Celina, Texas (just north of Dallas) on March 14th, 2025 and it was an amazing experience in many ways. After many years of saving and waiting for the real estate market to cool down while living with Kayla's parents, we finally had a cozy home of our own!

Week One: Moved In!

Kayla and I are both homebodies that desperately need our home to be in order, so we made quick work of unpacking and getting settled in. Ariana of course was our little helper during every step. Unpacking boxes? I got it Mama. Assembling furniture? Let me at it Dada.

We did small renovations on our home like new light fixtures, and even met new friends in the Costco cafeteria that turned out to live in our neighborhood! They had two smaller kids and so it didn't take long for us to begin talking about setting up Ariana's first play dates with them.

Ariana was very happy during this first week. We have a long hallway to her bedroom, and that hallway was filled with laughs and our little 16 month old borderline running down the hallway. Looking back, I do wonder if she was feeding off myself and Kayla's excitement of our new home.

In the moment though, things were looking really bright during this time, and our new area was already beginning to feel right to us.

Week Two: Fever

It started about a week after we moved into our new home. Ariana developed a fever and was irritable and not sleeping well. Her eyelids became a little swollen.

We found a pediatrician in the area and had her checked out for the usual scares. Covid, the Flu, maybe a UTI. All tests came back negative, and we were sent home without much concern from the doctor other than ensuring she stayed hydrated. They said that we should come back in if the fever persisted into the following week.

Our theory crafting began soon after.

We figured it was allergies from being in a new area. She also has been teething with her molars, so maybe that was contributing to her symptoms as well. Of course it was also a brand new home and area for her. Ariana has always been a very calm child, but having your entire surroundings suddenly changing is a dramatic experience for a toddler.

So we concluded it was a combination of these things, and gave it time.

We saw a high of 104° on Monday, but a few days later the fever broke! She seemed a little back to herself and wasn’t as irritable, but she still had some swelling around her eyes. We chalked it off as being some lingering allergy related symptoms.

It is worth mentioning that up to this point, Ariana has only ever been sick once in her entire life. She tested positive for Covid back in January, and showed symptoms (a fever) for exactly one day. Everyone else in our home during that time was not quite as lucky though (lol), and if I'm remembering correctly, Covid knocked me out for a straight week shortly after Ariana tested positive.

Week Three: Back to Normal?

The following week, Ariana seemed to spring back to her typical calm and happy self. The smiles and laughs came back while her body temperature continued to be in a normal range. The swelling in her eyes was still apparent though (maybe even worse?), and we once again assumed it was allergies.

Something Isn't Right

By Friday night she began to have a low grade fever again. This time hovering around 100-102 degrees or so. She was also irritable and became increasingly clingy throughout the weekend. Typically our little girl is fiercely independent, but during this week she had to be held. She also loves food but she was being picky with what was on her plate, which is very unusual for her. Maybe the most unusual symptom though was that she developed this "grunt" when exhaling, and seemed to have some trouble with breathing.

So we took her back to the pediatrician.

After looking at her top to bottom, our pediatrician did see a little infection in both ears, and so Ariana was given some antibiotics. Great, we finally found out what was going on!

The week went on, and every day felt like a yo-yo of her temperature going up and down. After being on antibiotics for a few days, we were not really seeing much improvement. The fever persisted, and she was getting increasingly more irritable and clingy as the week went on. She took twice as many naps as usual.

By Thursday, Ariana woke up that day being even more irritable. She didn't want to eat food, and she was clearly uncomfortable. Her temperature was around 100 degrees. Something wasn't adding up and I was beginning to form a worrying gut feeling.

Kayla and I decided to call the pediatrician to schedule an appointment for later in the day. They didn't end up having availability, and so we pivoted towards finding an urgent care center in the area. Before heading to urgent care, our pediatrician called us and made a plan for us to get a chest X-ray and redo the urine analysis while we were at urgent care.

Because of the difficulty she was having with breathing, we wanted to find an urgent care that could take a chest X-ray to see if there was anything going on with her lungs. We first tried Children's Urgent Care, and were sent away after they mentioned that they don't have the ability to do a chest X-ray. So instead we went to Cook Children's Urgent Care, arriving around 5pm on Thursday, April 10th. This was a major blessing in retrospect, and I'll speak more on this in future posts.

They got us in quickly, and we gave them the laundry list of symptoms Ariana was experiencing. They started where our pediatrician left off: Chest X-ray and urine analysis. Both tests came back with no signs of infection. We thought this is good, it's probably just her ear infection causing her discomfort. However, the doctors still weren't 100% sure if we were in the clear. Ariana presented with a very distended belly and an elevated resting heart rate (about 170 bpm...which is very high).

After a few hours at urgent care, there was a point where they exhausted all of their tests, and concluded that we should go to the ER to get further testing and imaging done.

Diagnosis of Leukemia

Cook Children's Hospital is located in the same parking lot as their urgent care center where we were, so we headed straight over to their ER.

If I'm recalling correctly, it was about 8 pm at this point.

The Emergency Room was calm and we were the only ones in the waiting room. Just like their urgent care, they were able to promptly see us and we headed into triage. We were able to answer the "What are her symptoms?" like a well rehearsed monologue after having to repeat ourselves so many times throughout this week about what has been happening: Low grade fevers, swelling, grunting, irritable...it doesn't make sense.

After triage, we headed into one of the ER rooms.

The very first thing they wanted to do was get a CBC (complete blood count) drawn, which was going to require them retrieving blood from an IV. Watching them have to place an IV on Ariana was so hard and since she is so strong willed, she didn't want to be still. It took three attempts and two different sets of staff to get an IV placed. After about an hour and a half, they finally got the blood they needed and their testing began behind the scenes.

While waiting on results from the blood test, they proceeded with an ultrasound of the stomach. Since this is the area that we saw was very distended, we needed to figure out what was going on.

Time moves very slow in the ER. It took hours to get results back. The doctor came in and said that the ultrasound showed that Ariana had an enlarged liver, spleen and heart for her age.

Huh...?

She is in the 90th percentile, so could it just be because she's a big kid? Ariana did have Covid earlier this year, so maybe these are long covid symptoms?

To figure out why, the doctor ordered an EKG. Another long wait for results, but eventually, we found out that the EKG was completely normal. Things slowed down as we just waited to hear what the doctor wanted to do next.

At this point we've been at the ER for six hours and it's around 2 am.

The ER doctor finally came into our room. Kayla was standing up while we played with Ariana at the bedside when the Doctor came back in for an update. I distinctly remember the doctor asking Kayla if she wanted to go ahead and sit down, uncanny like from a movie before bad news is given. I quickly dismissed that thought and figured the doctor was just being polite.

The doctor went on to explain that Ariana's blood counts looked suspicious, specifically her Neutrophils, Hemoglobin, and Platelets. She declared that Ariana was anemic, and that given her blood counts were abnormal, she very likely had Leukemia.

Everything the doctor said after that for probably the next 30 seconds is a complete blur to me.

The moment I heard Leukemia, the immediate emotion was denial, and then quickly after it felt as if I got struck by lightning and punched in the gut at the same time. After that was a strange numbness of emotion.

I sat there for a moment watching Kayla beginning to spiral and continuing to say exactly what I was thinking: "no... she's just our little girl".

My biggest worry a week ago was how I was going to manage all of the weeds in our yard back home, and like a Thanos snap our world quite literally turned upside down. Suddenly we had a 17 month old daughter with cancer.

Life started to come back to me, and I began feeling all the emotions again at once.

We began asking the doctor how they came to this conclusion, and if there was any possibility that this diagnosis was a mistake. She confidently and empathetically said no, followed by explaining that it took so long to analyze Ariana's blood test results because the doctor collaborated with their hematologist and oncologist to get a second and third opinion. She also explained that it's common for a Leukemia patient to have an enlarged liver and spleen because cancerous white blood cells tend to build up in the filtration organs.

The doctor did also mention that there are different types of Leukemia, and that we would learn about which type Ariana has in the morning once a pathologist was able to analyze her blood samples more closely.

Ariana was very calm through all of this, but Kayla and I were completely devastated. We really had no idea what this diagnosis meant for her, because up to this point Leukemia seemed like a fictional topic to us.

After the doctor left the room to give us some time to process things, I immediately went down the rabbit hole to begin understanding her diagnosis. What I can confidently say is that I'm very optimistic about Ariana's future and her ability to overcome this disease. Leukemia is one of the most studied and understood cancers, and it has a very good prognosis for young children like Ariana. With that said, the treatment timeline for Leukemia is over many months, and our entire lifestyle was about to completely change.

The doctor came back in a few minutes later, and told us that Ariana was going to be admitted into their PICU for the night, and that more tests would be run in the morning.

Everything after this was a blur for the night.

Ariana was admitted into the PICU at Cook Children's Medical Center in Prosper, Texas 4/11/2025 @ 3 am with a diagnosis of Leukemia.

Our plan for this blog

If you have made it this far, thank you. This journey has already been an extremely challenging one for Ariana, Kayla and myself, and we are looking at 6 months of treatment or more until this disease is in full remission.

We have received an incredible amount of love and thoughtfulness from our family and friends, and our goal for this blog is to provide updates during Ariana's entire journey with Leukemia to keep everyone in the loop.

With that said, as I'm writing this we are already two weeks past these events, and there will be many more blog posts in the coming weeks to get us to the current timeline.

How you can help support us

For now, the biggest support for us has been people sending love our way. This journey is hard, and a constant reminder of us realizing that we are not going through it alone is a huge deal.

• Please consider subscribing to this blog to receive an email whenever we have a new update. What's nice about this feature is that you will be notified when we have a new post, but you can read it in your own time.
• Please also consider leaving a comment on our posts. Engagement helps us foster a community for Ariana.

A lot of people have also asked how they can help us financially. This is a hard question to answer right now, but we are beginning to look into programs and fundraisers like Meal Train and GoFundMe. Ethically speaking, we don't want to be accepting money from others unless we feel like we need it, and we'll speak on this more in future posts as we learn more about the financial aspect of this journey. For now, we are okay.