Alizabeth Ludwig

On December 7th I was combing Alizabeth's hair into a ponytail, I noticed a few lumps on her right side of her neck. I counted around 6 of them. I thought yes her lymph nodes are swollen she had just gotten over a cough maybe it is just a side effect. As the day went on and as I asked a few other peoples opinions I got a bit scared and decided I would call the clinic the next day to see what they wanted to do. On Friday December 8th Alizabeth was seen at urgent care in St. Cloud where they tested her for strep which came back negative and they sent her home on an antibiotic with a follow up to our general Doctor. On December 12th I saw our family Doctor they did a blood panel on her the results of that came back ok nothing to alarming but she was still on the antibiotic and that could have altered things. Doctor told me to watch lymph nodes and to return in two weeks if they did not shrink or go away. In those two weeks we all went on with are normal routine Alizabeth finished her meds and nothing returned to normal. She seemed more tired taking 2 to 3 naps a day, her appetite went down and she just wasn't really herself.  We celebrated Christmas with our families that next week. On Day after Christmas,  I called General Doctor and got a referral to see ENT Specialist. We saw her on Tuesday the 26th. She said yes there is definetly something going on with her so she set up an ultrasound guided biopsy to be done but we couldn't get in until the 8th of January. So we went home. In the next few days Alizabeth started to go downhill. She was extremely tired, She had no appetite and she just didn't look good. She still had energy to play with her sisters, but something was just not right. On Friday December 29th I went back to my general doctor. Alizabeth and I spent 3 hours there trying to get to the cause of this. Our doctor did xrays and ultrasound, blood tests and more. Some of those tests were coming back a bit abnormal the ultrasound showed a swollen spleen and blood tests were showing low blood counts. We still had a lot of tests we had to wait for so we went home to get some rest. As the afternoon went on we got tired of waiting Alizabeth was not doing well. I got in contact with our nurse and she contacted the doctor. We all decided a trip to the ER was what we should do so Steve Alizabeth and I headed up to St. Cloud. We got seen right away the doctor called his fellow doctors and then called down to the childrens hospital. At around 1:00am we were being referred down to The University of Minnesota Masonic Children's Hospital.  We arrived at children's around 2:30am on Saturday December 30th.  We got settled into our room around 4:00am. We were seen by our team of doctors immediately. They ran tests and took xrays of Alizabeth, we were scared but relieved at the same time because we knew we were in good hands. On Saturday evening our care team came in around 6:30pm and gave us the news that no parent ever wants to here. "We are so sorry but our tests have shown that your little Alizabeth  indefinitely has what we call B- Lymphoblastic Leukemia or B-ALL we are so sorry but we are here to do what we can to get your little girl cured". ..............