Name: Tori
Diagnosis: T cell acute lymphoblastic leukemia
Home state: Florida
It was almost midnight and Tori’s grandmother Carol was sitting in a hospital emergency room trying to come to grips with what she had just been told: her 4-year-old granddaughter had cancer. The doctor on call told Carol that there wasn’t a lot that could be done. The feeling of despair made Carol physically ill.
It had been only two weeks since Tori’s routine checkup. At the time, the doctor had given Tori a clean bill of heath. But on this day, Tori’s neck had become swollen at school and turned blue. School officials told Carol that in the half-hour it took her to come get Tori, they could see the little girl’s neck growing larger.
Carol took Tori straight to the emergency room where a doctor told Carol that a mass in Tori’s upper chest was pushing its way to her neck. It was cancer.
Carol called her sister and begged her to come down to the hospital. “Tori’s got cancer,” she told her, “and I don't know what to do.”
Carol’s sister said she was on her way, but before she hung up the phone she added, “Don't let them do anything to her. You have to get her to St. Jude.”
Heeding her sister’s words, Carol told the doctor that she wanted Tori to be referred to St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital®. “We have one good shot at this and we feel like St. Jude is our best shot,” she told him.
Once St. Jude had accepted Tori, she needed to get to Memphis right away. The mass was dangerously close to blocking the little girl’s airway. She was flown into Memphis and put directly into intensive care. Further tests revealed the cancer was T cell acute lymphoblastic leukemia (ALL). St. Jude doctors went to work. “Within 11 days, her mass was gone,” Carol said. And Tori is still free of cancer cells as she continues her chemotherapy.
Carol said her sister still doesn’t know why she thought to say Tori should be at St. Jude, but the family is glad she did. “I think that if it wasn’t for St. Jude, we wouldn’t have Tori,” Carol said. “I am convinced of that. We had no hope of keeping her and now we are looking at her future.”
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