Fund Childhood Cancer Research in Honor of Rally Kid Alli
Fund Childhood Cancer Research in Honor of Rally Kid Alli
Alli’s Cancer Journey
better treatments and a CURE! There will be fun activities and games for everyone, great food, live music and guest appearances by your favorite Princesses, Star Wars heroes, friendly neighborhood spiderman! The kids can enjoy the bounce houses and face painting while you shop our local vendors knowing that proceeds and donations will go directly to the Rally Foundation for Childhood Cancer Research.
Alli’s Rally
Saturday, September 16th at 11am Spring Hill High School
September of 2021 began as normal as it always did for me and my family. School was in full swing, we were getting ready to start our Labor Day weekend. On that Thursday Alli had a fever, she was carried to the walk-in Friday morning (No fever) just to check her out and seemed fine. all tests were negative. As soon as we left she began crying that her arm hurt really bad, after about 30 minutes it subsided, we thought nothing more of it. That evening the fever returned again and was higher along with a new symptom, she couldn’t walk for being in so much pain, back to a different walk-in on Saturday morning, by the grace of God the same doctor that saw her on Friday happened to be there. He immediately sent us to Williamson Medical for testing. We still had not even considered the possibility that this could be something very serious. After a short time at Williamson the doctor informed us that an ambulance was on its way to take our little girl to Vanderbilt. Her little body was drained of white and red blood cells and platelets. She needed transfusions, fast. We were looking at a disorder or Leukemia. We had the 20 minute drive from Williamson to Vanderbilt to process and pray before “normal” was gone. That weekend they also found that she was fighting a MRSA infection in her blood. Our fears were realized September the 7th when the results came back that she did have Cancer, and a week later we were told she had a rare mutation , moving her into the high risk category. It was weeks before she would start to walk again on her own. She was admitted into Vanderbilt on the evening of Sept. 4th and was able to finally go home a month later. She missed all of second grade with her friends as she completed the rest of the year remotely. She has been pricked, poked, sick, lost her hair, gone through several MRIs and spent more time in a hospital than ANY child should have to. And there are so many more just like her. I’m tired of hearing how rare childhood cancer is, it’s not. There should be more awareness. There should be easier treatments. Only 4% of federal funding goes to Pediatric Cancers. It’s not enough. Regular Chemotherapy couldn’t put her in remission, twice, we were told that “she should reach remission after this stage” and twice we were heartbroken. It wasn’t until she was given an immunotherapy drug that we finally heard the words “no Leukemia cells were detected”. Without donations for research for things like what she was given she would have had to have a bone marrow transplant. Alli is still in active treatment almost 2 years later and she is scheduled to end treatment on December 28th this year! She is thriving now and so happy with her new curly hair that is growing in thick and beautiful. She is strong and is always smiling!