Emily Ayers God Loves Emily

Welcome to our CaringBridge site. We've created it to keep friends and family updated. We thank God for the miracles he is working in Emily's life.  We appreciate your support and words of hope and encouragement during this time when it matters most.  We hope you see too the way God takes care of us when we trust Him!  


Emily is an 8 year old little girl who has lived with Congenital neutropenia, a very rare blood disorder that compromises her immune system, since being diagnosed at 10 months old.  She has had daily shots of neupogen in order to speed her bone marrow into making more neutrophils which allow her to fight bacterial infections.  After a recent check of her blood, the Drs noticed her blood numbers were not right.  Her ANC count was extremely low, she was severely anemic and her spleen was enlarged.  All signs indicated aml leukemia and so immediately we had to have a bone marrow aspiration.  Thanking God for his mercy, Emily did not have aml leukemia, however her bone marrow has changed and she was diagnosed with myelodysplastic syndrome or more specifically monosomy 7 myelodysplasia.  This meant that Emily was in need of a bone marrow transplant as it was almost guaranteed she would develop leukemia, could be weeks, months or years.  God was telling us the time was now and we immediately followed His direction as He had this all laid out for us.  We were in the process of moving from Arkansas to Florida and so we were in between two different oncology units.  Immediately God's plan started to lay out for us.  We chose Duke Children's Hospital to have the transplant as this was the direction we felt we were led.  Doors opened in so many ways in the weeks to follow.   The first step was to start working on a donor for the marrow.  Once again, God had this figured out and while it's a less than 25% chance of having a related donor, God blessed Emily with her older sister Kendall being a match!  Thank you God for your blessings.  The next step was to find housing for us as she is required to stay in Duke for at least 60 days past the transplant date.  I called the housing coordinator and began working on this process.  I started with explaining what we were looking forwhich was a two bedroom apartment.  She then proceeded with telling me that she had a three bedroom completely furnished apartment and that it was free to us!!!  Once again, God gets all the glory!!  We are so blessed!  So today is the first day at Duke children's where we start our journey......thank you Jesus for bringing us here and healing Our Emily!