Virginia Christine Scovel

December 18, 2023 will be my 5 year anniversary of my stem cell transplant.   A lot has happened in the past 5 years.  April 2019, 4 months after transplant, I ended up back in the hospital with a heart rate of 39.  YEP>>>39, ended up with a pacemaker 4 days after being admitted and arguing with the docs that I didn’t need it.  When I went to the OR my heart rate was 25 and I was still arguing with them.   After that I didn’t sit still for a minute, I took my youngest son on day and weekend trips and we explored areas of Kentucky. Fall of 2019 was my youngest son’s start of his senior year, so I was totally dedicated to his activities and gave every minute of my free time to them.   Covid hit in spring of 2020 and changed everyone’s lives.  Took away some of the senior activities he was so looking forward too.  I grieved with him as I was looking forward to those with him.   June 2020, we were hit head on by a careless driver.  We suffered some injuries, I had lots of external bruising and tissue damage, as well as a fracture just below my knee.  Matthew suffered a lot of internal bruising and an L1 fracture. He didn’t recover the way he should have, in fact he started declining.  We had multiple tests done and nothing could be detected so it became a guessing game.  July 19th, everything changed when he collapsed on my kitchen floor. Off to the ER we went.   July 22nd, he was diagnosed with Acute Lymphoblastic Leukemia (A. L. L.) .  Cancer had struck our family again!  My bright, lover of life, sweet, carismatic boy had cancer.  Talk about a punch in the gut!  We spent many months following in the hospital for his treatments.  He took his last Chemo pill on Nov. 13, 2022, is in complete remission and we celebrated big.  He still has a lot of medical appointments ahead of him and doing a lot of therapy to gain his strength and endurance back. 

  How do you recover from 5 years of dealing with 2 types of cancer in your home?  You keep pressing forward and thank God every day that you both survived.   Cancer changes you, watching your child battle cancer changes you even more.   There are so many things we were both robbed of and now we take nothing for granted. 

I just recently had a check up and got a good report.  Matthew gave us a little scare but after a bone marrow biopsy the results show he is still clear and in remission.  We are survivors!

We say it loud  We are SURVIVORS!   Now it’s time to live!