‘It’s one of the worst feelings you can ever imagine’
“It began with strep throat, and it just wouldn’t go away. The doctors thought it was my kids passing it back and forth. Then he started having bloody noses. It got to the point where his pillowcase would be covered in blood. The doctors kept telling us it was seasonal allergies and that the air was too dry. But then he started getting tired a lot. He was on a road trip with my sister to go tubing in Austin. She said that he slept the whole way there. He was even falling asleep while they were tubing, and he slept the whole way back. The following weekend he went water skiing with my cousin, and he came back covered in bruises. They said that he fell a lot, so that’s what we attributed it to.
“He was with his grandmother one weekend, and he started throwing up. We thought it was a stomach virus. She called to say that she was taking him to the emergency room. I had to go to work the next morning, so she told me, ‘Don’t worry about it. I’ll handle it.’ I got a phone call at 2:30 in the morning, telling me I needed to come to the hospital. When I got there, the doctor pulled me into a room and told me that they thought he had leukemia. I was leaning against a bed, and I literally fell off it. And I started crying. It’s like you hear those words, and while you can see everything in the world continue to move all around you, you feel like time is standing still. It’s one of the worst feelings you could ever imagine.
“They took him to Texas Children’s Hospital. He was in the Pediatric Intensive Care Unit for about a week. His potassium level was so high, his calcium level was so low, and his white blood cell count was something like 350,000. They told us that if he had not gone to the hospital when he did, he would have been dead that week.”
— Jillian Presley (with son, Joey)
Joey received chemotherapy to treat his T-cell acute lymphoblastic leukemia. He was in remission, and seemed to be doing well, when he relapsed. That’s when it was determined he needed a bone marrow transplant.
(Note: Joey Santiago passed away on May 29, 2019.)
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