The Initial diagnosis

Let me start this off by saying thank you to everyone who has been praying continuously for Bella. We have a very very long road ahead. A little over 3 years to be specific if things go as planned. But I will get into that a little later. Bella our first love has always been healthy. Never in a million years would we have thought this would happen to her or our family for that matter. It is true what they say, one day can change your whole life forever. I'm sure people are wondering how we found out and what symptoms she was showing and yada yada. About 4 weeks ago Bella was playing and jumping on a friends trampoline. All of the sudden she was screaming in pain. She had said she fell while jumping. She wouldn't walk or put any pressure on it. So I continued to watch her for a few hours and she still wouldn't walk on it. I decided after talking to our regular doctor to take her to Phoenix children's hospital urgent care since it was a Friday and the doctors office was already closed. They did X-rays and checked her out. Their diagnosis was a toddler fracture and even though one did not show up on the X-ray that's what they believed. This is a common injury in toddlers that jump on trampolines and/or bounce houses and a factor doesn't always show up on the X-ray right away. If this was the case we would do a follow up in a week but no other treatments except she wouldn't be able to walk for up to 6 weeks. If she choose to walk on her own then it probably wasn't that and she just pulled a muscle or something that would heal on its own. She started walking on Sunday so this made us very happy. I didn't want to be stuck at home alone with 2 kids that couldn't walk. I mean can you imagine. So about a week later she hurt her other leg. Same thing. We thought it was from jumping on the trampoline and she was just gonna be one of those that just can't jump on one. She started walking on the just a few hours later so I didn't even take her to the doctor. Well she was still limping a week later, so we decided we needed to take her and see what they thought was wrong. From there he checked her and assessed her. He suggested that we just do some more X-rays see if this was possibly a toddler fracture. During our visit I mentioned fevers that she gets on a frequent occurrence with no other symptoms. He said he would give me an order for blood so that if I wanted to take her in to rule out a few things that would of course be ok with him. We decided to wait to see what the results of the X-ray first and then possibly take her Monday. Over the course of the weekend she had a low grade fever that I treated with motrin and Tylenol. On Sunday Leo and I noticed how she was looking slightly pale. So on Monday after a little persistence from a friend I decided to put us both through that. She did very well and only cried a little. I was expecting results to come in that night around 7 like usual but no call came so I thought to myself that must be a good sign. We went to bed as normal. At 2:58am my cell rang. I thought great some person drunk dialed the wrong number. So I of course ignored the call. A voicemail then popped up so I started to listen. At first I heard nothing but then I am hearing a man speaking. He is saying he believes something is seriously wrong with Isabella and I should call him back immediately. I of course called him right back. He said her preliminary blood results were back and her platelets and her white blood count are very low. He believes it is leukemia. He asked how she was sleeping? Was she sleeping comfortably? I looked in and she was sleeping as sound as normal. So he said I could wait till morning to take her to the hospital but that I should do it immediately when she wakes up. He then asked if she had been running some fevers. And she had all weekend from Friday on. He said I should get up and take her immediately to the E.R. So this is where we headed at 3am Tuesday morning. To end this part of Bella's journey let me just say I am grateful we caught it when we did. God knew what he is doing and will continue to lead us in this journey that we are on.