SANTIAGO ANDRE MORALES-RAMOS

#SANTIANDRESTRONG

DREAM TRIP TO HAWAII

$310.00 of $5,000

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“Santiago was an active 3-year-old, who enjoyed playing with cars. He was attending a pre-school and enjoyed learning new things. Prior to getting his diagnosis, he started to get sick. He had an ear infection after another and his sister got better while he had a hard time getting better. He also started complaining about abdominal pain and one day as he returned from school, I noticed a few bruises. I thought bruises were just normal for playing but he continued to complain about his stomach. That night we decided to take him to the emergency room. At the emergency room, they ran several tests and said that it was his appendix and they needed to transfer him to another hospital. He got transferred to a Dallas hospital around 3 am on February 4, 2020. Before the surgery, for appendicitis, they ran more blood tests and once they got the results the doctors came to our room and shared the devastating news that Santiago's blood work wasn't normal. His white blood cells were so high that it could only mean either leukemia or lymphoma. At that moment the world stopped for us. We knew what those words meant, cancer. He quickly got moved to the oncology area and they started chemotherapy right away. His diagnosis came to be Acute Myeloid Leukemia. He spent the rest of the month getting 10 consecutive days of different types of chemotherapy and since the treatment for AML is more aggressive he had to spend almost 30 consecutive days at the hospital. Since he was able to get into remission after the first round of chemotherapy our medical team was confident that Santiago could do good with 4 more rounds of chemotherapy making it a total of 5 rounds. Each round consisted of 8-10 days of different chemotherapies followed by a period of waiting for her body to recover and have some immune system so that he can go home for a week and come back for another month of treatment. He spent about 160 days as an inpatient and given the time and the pandemic made this process even harder on us. When only one caregiver was allowed at a time. I will spend the weeks with Santiago and on the weekends we will change with my husband so I could go and see our 1-year-old girl, Emilia. His treatment finished on August 15, 2020, and our medical team mentioned that if we could make it to two years without relapse Santiago would be good. Santiago then had a "normal" year with monthly visits to the clinic and a bit of isolation trying to protect from COVID. In August 2021we decided to enroll him in kindergarten and we were confident that he could make it to two years in remission but on February 8, 2022, we were back at the hospital getting confirmation that his cancer was back. This news hit us really hard again. We knew what was coming, more chemotherapy, it all felt like we had never left the hospital. This time around we needed to do a bone marrow transplant. Our daughter, Emilia, got tested to check for matches and we got blessed since she was a 10/10 match for Santiago. This time I was about 8 months pregnant and needed to get one kid into chemotherapy and the other one prepared for transplant and trying to deliver a baby before transplant to be able to support Santiago during his transplant phase. The baby was born a week before Santiago got sent home for two weeks to prepare him for a bone marrow transplant. The transplant took place on May 10th, 2022. We had Emilia under procedure on the 2nd floor while Santiago was being prepared to receive Emilia's cells.

Cancer has definitely affected Santiago and all of our family. Santiago has become more introverted and less active. He keeps smiling and trying to push through like you can always see in his picture but it has definitely taken away from his childhood. These past 2 years have been tough with a lot of isolation from family, friends, fun adventures, etc. We have been spending the majority of the time at home trying to get Santiago to a point where he can start doing fun things again. He didn't even get to finish his first year of Kinder. This trip will mean the world to Santiago and to our family. It will be a time to heal and stop worrying about relapses, medical appointments, etc. After everything, this kid needs to have some fun and we hope we can get to that day to see him being normal, enjoying life as he should without more medications and weekly visits to the clinic. We just want an opportunity for all to feel normal and get all the pain of these two years behind us. Enjoy our new family of 5. “

- Maria Morales-Ramos