Local girl bravely battles leukemia
It’s been a over a year since former radiation therapist Cindy Mcloughlin and her husband, Dr. Travers McLoughlin, received the devastating news that their now 6-year-old daughter Julia had leukemia.
During the past year there have been many ups and down, but Julia and her family continue to remain optimistic. She takes oral chemo everyday, receives chemo through an IV and spinal taps every three to four weeks and takes steroids five days out of every month. There have been a few instances where the chemo didn’t work and the dosage had to be raised.
The road to recovery is long and difficult.
According to Cindy, the treatment process for little girls with leukemia usually takes two years or longer, so Julia another year to go. If all goes well her last treatment will be June 6, 2019.
Even though her daughter’s last treatment is scheduled for next year, Cindy said this will be a lifelong journey. After treatment is completed, it takes up to five years for a person to be considered cured, Cindy said. She is also worried about the side affects Julia will have from all of the chemo and steroids she has taken.
There are also small victories in the day-to-day battles. For example, Julia is enjoying the return of her hair.
“She’s happy about that. She got to pick out some bows and stuff,” Cindy said.
But the cancer and the treatment make it nearly impossible for Julia to be a normal 6year-old girl.
Due to several hospitalizations and low white blood cell counts, Julia was only able to attend kindergarten for the last few weeks of the school year.
“It has affects on her heart, on her brain and learning,” Cindy said. “A lot of leukemia patients struggle with weight issues as they get older because the steroids really have messed up their whole metabolism. I just don’t want her to struggle with any of the long-term health affects.”
To help Julia process her feelings during her fight with cancer, Cindy and Travers made the decision to enter her into counseling with a child therapist.
“She was just angry at missing school so much and all of her friends. (Therapy has) been a huge help, so I’m glad we did it,” Cindy said. “It’s interesting. When she’s on a chemo hold her personality comes back, and she’s much more happy. The steroids affect her moods and it takes like five days for the steroids to get out of her system so basically we’re looking like at almost two weeks out of the month that the steroids really affect her.”
With Cindy being a former radiation therapist and Travers being an oncologist, it’s been hard to watch their daughter battle a disease they’ve been trained to treat and not be able to do anything about it.
“Its sucks,” Cindy said. “For anybody it sucks to see your kid go through it. It’s a hard thing to watch and you wonder why her, but I have to hope that there is a reason for all this, that God has a plan, that it’s all going to work out. That’s kind of what I hold on to.”
Julia’s battle has helped her father to be able to relate more to his patients, Cindy said.
“Now he can actually say ‘I understand how you feel’ to the family because he does understand, because he’s living it,” Cindy said.
To keep Julia spirits up they try to go on family trips and do activities that she enjoys, such as riding her horses and going to the movies.
“We just try to keep her occupied. We try to keep things as normal as we can, but there is no normal anymore,” Cindy said.
On her good days, Julia enjoys playing with her dogs and putting bows on them, baking muffins with her mom, playing dress-up with her dolls and playing in her toy kitchen.
For Julia’s next year of treatment, Cindy is hoping that her daughter stays healthy and free of fevers. A fever is guaranteed admission into the hospital, and antibiotics would have to be taken immediately to make sure there is no infection in her chemo port. Infection of the port could be fatal if the child doesn’t get antibiotics right away, Cindy said. The child could die within hours.
“Her getting a fever is always a big, big deal. We’ve got to pack up everything. We’ve got to run to the hospital, and they have to access the port and start antibiotics right away,” Cindy said. “Then we’re at the hospital a minimum of 24 hours but we’ve never gotten out in 24 hours. We spend like 10 days. It always turns into something else.”
The long stays in the hospital are taxing on the rest of the family, Cindy said, with she and Travers raising two other boys and him working full-time.
In order to make things easier they recently placed their Acampo home on the market and plan to move closer to Roseville where Julia’s doctors are located.
Moving forward, Cindy hopes that complications are minimal for Julia and that she will maintain her instinct to fight.
“That’s what keeps her going because she definitely has a strong personality. I hope it stays like that,” Cindy said.