Woman fights leukemia: ‘I want to be here to rock that baby’
Her husband died on Jan 2, 2013, after a painful fouryear battle with lung cancer. That left Sue Powers determined that — if she ever faced the disease — she wouldn’t go through the same excruciating experience.
So when the Powell woman was met with her own cancer diagnosis in August 2017, daughter Cheryl Spiler didn’t expect what she heard after the initial tears had stopped.
“All of a sudden, she just pulled back, and she said — she knew we were trying to get pregnant — and she said, ‘I’m going to fight, because I want to be here to rock that baby,’” Spiler said. “To do that for me — I’ll never forget that.”
Powers was an active 76-year-old with no symptoms of her acute myeloid leukemia, and her first hematologist had told her she was going to die. Still, she was referred to the Arthur G. James Cancer Hospital at Ohio State University’s Comprehensive Cancer Center.
There, after more blood tests and another bone-marrow biopsy, a doctor told her about a clinical trial in which she would take a daily pill.
Just one pill a day. None of the chemotherapy, radiation and other therapies that had ravaged her husband. She hopped on board. That clinical trial, she learned, is part of the Leukemia & Lymphoma Society’s ambitious “Beat AML” initiative for patients over 60 who are newly diagnosed with acute myeloid leukemia. Patients are screened for genetic makers associated with the disease and, within seven days, are assigned therapies based on what is found.
For Powers, and 22 others, the therapy is a pill called AG-221.
As part of the AML trial, Powers started her treatment in September 2017 and was hit hard by one of its side effects: differentiation syndrome. In her, it largely manifested in various infections that at times led to hospitalizations, parts of which she doesn’t remember. She regularly received blood transfusions and platelets. She had no appetite, shrank from about 115 or 120 pounds to just 92 and was weak, frail and malnourished.
Spiler and her four brothers took turns taking their mom to doctor appointments. At one, sitting in a wheelchair in a waiting room with one of her sons, Powers told him to let her die.
But her treatment team told her to hang in there, that she would turn the corner. And she did.
Spiler thinks the upswing started in October 2017, after she told her mother she was pregnant.
“It made a world of difference, because I love babies,” Powers said last week as she sat on the floor of her home with her 5-month-old grandson, Danny. “I had eight grandchildren, but my youngest was 14 years old, so this little guy made a big difference.”
Dr. John Byrd, a hematologist at Ohio State, is a Beat AML lead investigator with various responsibilities, including the assignment of treatment regimens. He presented initial data on trial results at the American Society of Hematology’s annual meeting in San Diego this month. Among them: Of the 23 trial patients who have taken AG-221, 10 are in remission.
Born about four years ago out of frustration with a decades-long lack of advances in AML treatments, the initiative led to the FDA approving four drugs targeting AML this year, including three in November, Byrd said.
As Powers recovered from her nose dive late last year, she spent several weeks at a rehabilitation hospital, then returned home, only to face another setback. A blackout caused her to fall, breaking her left hip. That led to a partial hip replacement.
Powers was back home in January. Spiler said her “Energizer Bunny” mother got stronger every day, making her comeback.
In April, eight months after her diagnosis, Powers was told she was in remission. She’s back to exercising and continues to take her daily pill and see her doctor monthly.
Powers also underwent another hip surgery in May — this time on the right side — in hopes of being able to get down on the floor to play with her coming grandchild. It was the surgery she had been anticipating more than a year earlier when preoperative blood work showed anomalies that led to her cancer diagnosis.
At the end of June, Danny Spiler was born. His grandmother helped his mother through labor and fed him his first bottle. Last week, she was indeed on the floor with Danny.