Parker's Journey
Diagnosis & Surgeries
Parker embraced the move from North Carolina to Utah in early Summer 2020. On the day she arrived in her new hometown, a combination of unremarkable symptoms & her mom's intuition, landed her at Primary Children’s Hospital in Salt Lake City.
Misdiagnoses led to a late June hospitalization. Subsequent testing and imagining revealed a mass in her abdomen.
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July saw her first surgery to remove the blockage. With the biopsy results, came the cancer diagnosis.
A second surgery in August was undertaken to ensure positive margins and complete removal of any and all cancer.
All hoped & prayed the surgeries would be her cure.
Chemotherapy
An MRI in November identified a small mass in a different location of Parker's abdomen. By January 2021, scans revealed significant growth and additional tumors.
Parker underwent a third surgery to reduce the various masses. Upon further testing, pathology reclassified her cancer as 'infantile fibrosarcoma'. She then began targeted treatment with a MEK inhibitor, initially successful but later unsuccessful.
Chemotherapy commenced in May 2021 with dactinomycin & vincristine, initially shrinking the tumors but later raising concerns of insufficient response. This led to a shift to more potent ifosfamide and doxorubicin due to potential recurrence or spread risks.
Radiation
Over the course of the summer of 2021, Parker completed multiple rounds of chemotherapy. By August, imagining showed two of the tumors had responded to chemotherapy, but that two areas were failing to respond to treatment, enlarging and increasingly PET avid.
In September 2021, Parker had aggressive surgery to again remove the diseased areas.
Immediately following her recovery from surgery, she when to New York City where she spent over a month undergoing whole abdomen radiation at Memorial Sloan Kettering.
Parker's first scan of 2022 occurred in January and showed no signs of visible disease or tumors.
However, the elation was brief. Just over a month later, imaging would show multiple masses all measuring greater than 5CMs and all demonstrating aggressive growth rates.
End of treatment
In April of 2022, Parker was once again admitted to Primary Children's Hospital, but this time she never came home.
With every option imaginable having been thoroughly explored and exhausted, treatment was replaced by palliative care.
After several weeks, with her parents by her side, Parker passed away.
Parker was 11 years old.