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Hello, i'm Anna, and I first got introduced to Childrens Hospital Colorado in December of 2015 when I got flight for life from my local hospital. I had a very severe pneumonia in my left lung, I couldn't stand, couldn't walk, and I had a very hard time breathing. I stayed in the PICU (A pediatric intensive care unit) for three days, then was moved to the ACUTE (a branch of secondary health care, active or short-term) floor for the next three days.
I went back home after those six days in the hospital, was back at school, and finally was caught up with my school work when a couple of months later I started having severe pain. The pain was sharp, and was right around my heart area, I went to the doctor and got an X-Ray. There was a perfect circle of something in my left lung, my local doctor sent the X-Ray to Childrens to give it a closer look. It turns out that the circle in my lung was a tumor and needed to be removed. So within the next month I had half of my left lung removed. Overall it was a three hour surgery and I woke up tubes in and out of me. I then stayed eight days at the hospital, (faster then most people would recover) but on the last day I was told that the tumor in my lung was in fact cancer.
I needed to have my bone marrow tested since the kind of cancer I have was a type of bone cancer. It turns out that on one of my hips, I had less than 1% of Ewings. It's definitely not a lot but it means that my cancer spread from my lung to my marrow. That's what makes my cancer rare, only 17 cases of this type of cancer have been recorded in the world.
I needed 14 rounds of chemotherapy, over 300 needles, 6 blood and platelet transfusions, and 3 surgerys in between. It was a hard and long Journey but the Childrens Hospital of Colorado helped me feel better, made me smile, and saved my life... Twice. They really made me feel at home, I'm going to miss the hospital with needles and all, they will always be my second family.