Landon Hammett

Four years ago Landon had a biopsy on a lymph node that was removed from his neck.  The results showed that he had follicular lymphoma. Because he had no other symptoms other than the enlarged lymph nodes, no other treatment occurred at that time.  He was monitored by the doctors and everything seemed fine. About 7 weeks ago, Landon began having back pain.  He went to the doctor and was prescribed physical therapy.  There was some improvement and change in the muscular issues that were going on which were interpreted as improvement until about two week ago when he slowly began to be unable to feel his legs and feet.  It progressively became worse and by Thanksgiving he could not walk.  On Thanksgiving night, we went to the ER where they ran several tests, all of which came back normal.  About 3am, they did an MRI. At 4am they told us the reason he could not feel his legs or walk was because there was a tumor on his spine.  He was admitted to the hospital around 6am.  Late Friday afternoon, we met with several sets of doctors and it was decided that the best plan was to remove the tumor.  Surgery began around 7 that night.  The doctors were able to remove about 85% of the tumor.  The rest of it had started to grow around his spine so it was too dangerous for them to try and remove any more.  Since surgery, Landon has shown tremendous improvement.  He can feel his legs and feet. He will not be able to come straight home.  He will have to spend some time at a rehab facility to learn how to walk again.  Although, he is doing very well right now with help.  His recovery from the surgery is going very well.  The next step is to find out the cause of the tumor.  We know there is a strong liklihood that it is some type of lymphoma that will require some type of chemo therapy starting once the pathology report comes back, but we will not know for sure for about 10 days.  We'll start updating when we know!