Mary Jane was an amazing mom! She was always juggling her 4 kids’ activities. But a week before her 6-year-old daughter Katie would graduate kindergarten, she began feeling terrible pain in her left shoulder after attending her brother’s baseball game. Although she had fallen down earlier that day while playing with some of the neighbor kids, she insisted that the pain wasn’t from the fall. Mary Jane gave her aspirin and, later, other children’s pain relievers but nothing eased her throbbing pain. On Monday morning, Mary Jane took her daughter to the doctor. After he took an X-ray and saw the results, he called in a bone specialist. And although the specialist couldn’t find any reason for her pain, he decided to hospitalize Katie as a precautionary measure. What followed were two days of tests and mounting anxiety for Katie and her family.
“When they kept running tests on Katie, something in the back of my mind kept telling me that something was seriously wrong,” she remembers.” You keep hoping and praying it’s a pulled muscle or something like that, but deep inside you know otherwise.”
Finally when a hematologist who had previously been on staff at St. Jude viewed Katie’s blood test, he recognized the unique cell composition of acute lymphoblastic leukemia.
When the Schueths learned the horrifying news about their daughter, they wasted no time. The next morning (Mary Jane received a police escort in her “green goose” Impala from the hospital back home), Katie and her parents were aboard an airplane and on their way to Memphis.
Immediately upon arrival, St. Jude doctors ran a bone marrow test and a spinal tap to confirm the original diagnosis. All of the events happened so quickly Saturday, the first pain; Monday, the doctor’s office; Tuesday, the local hospital; Wednesday, the diagnosis; and Thursday, the first treatment at St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital. Instead of tap dancing on a stage in her first recital, Katie found herself in a hospital room at St. Jude receiving chemotherapy. But just four weeks after beginning her treatment at St. Jude, Katie went into remission!
“Thank God we came here,” Mrs. Schueth says. “This is where all the research is done, and the drugs are discovered and defined. St. Jude is where I wanted my daughter to be!”
Mary Jane drove back and forth to Memphis for 10 for every single one of Katie’s blood tests, spinal taps, chemo treatments, etc. With her support, Katie has now been cancer-free for 40 years!