Beau Pitts is the 7 month old son of Daniel and Lauren Pitts, and little brother to 2 year old sister Carleigh Pitts, all of Rhine, Georgia. Beau was recently diagnosed with Acute Myeloid Leukemia and is currently undergoing treatment and chemotherapy at Children's Elgeston Hospital in Atlanta, GA. Beau has a long journey to recovery, and this family will incur many expenses from medical treatment, lodging, travel and the like in the coming months. Any money donated will help with expenses for Beau and his family on this journey. All of the support, prayers, and love are so greatly appreciated by Beau's family and friends.

To follow along with Beau's Journey with updates on his progress, please check out the Facebook Page - https://www.facebook.com/Beaus-Journey-108319368928713.

The initial post from Beau's Mom Lauren:

Long post ahead, but we’ve had tons of people checking in and this is the easiest way to inform everyone.

As many people know, Beau had a seizure on Friday (5/5) morning and he seized for over an hour. We were transferred from DCH to Egleston in Atlanta. We were in the emergency department from about 5 PM on Friday to 7 AM Saturday(5/6). They done blood work and a CT scan of his head and discovered a mass and abnormal WBC AND RBC labs. We were moved into PICU and were given lots of possibilities all at once, but nothing could be confirmed until an MRI and more blood work was completed. They sedated him and took him for the MRI which they weren’t able to finish it due to him coughing and moving in the middle of it. They done a respiratory swab to see what has him coughing and congested. The preliminary results said Pertussis/whooping cough. They sent a confirmatory swab off. They had to have the MRI done ASAP so the next step was to intubate(vent) and sedate him in order to do that. We were in the PICU waiting room when the blood results came back and we were told that he has Acute Myeloid Leukemia or AML for short. There are two types of leukemia (ALL and AML) and AML is harder to treat and much more aggressive than ALL. Obviously our world came crashing down around us, and our whole lives changed when we heard this news. Every parent fears something like this. Daniel and I have said multiple times in the past that this is our biggest fear as parents and now that has turned into a reality for us. We let immediate family know and began to take time to process all of the information that we were given. They moved forward with the MRI and were able to get it and they left him on the vent overnight last night. This morning (5/7) we found out that there is more than one spot in his head, not on his brain but growing from the skull towards the brain. The mass that was seen in the CT scan is putting pressure on the brain which is what caused the seizure. The place that we have been watching on the outside of his head (we’d been told it was a hematoma a couple of weeks ago by two different tests) is actually cancer. He has remained sedated all day today. The confirmatory swab results come back and confirmed that he definitely does have Whooping Cough also so we are treating that with the recommended treatment plan. We had a meeting with the oncology team today and went over everything and began talking about treatment and began with the decision making process. Beau will be going to the OR tomorrow morning and will be having a central line placed and a bone marrow biopsy done. It is anticipated at this time that he will begin treatments on Tuesday. As far as extubation, they can’t tell us for sure when that will happen since the Whooping Cough diagnosis is in play now as well. He has been very agitated under sedation and his oxygen levels and breathing have given us a few scares.

We do know that we will be here for at least a month this time before we’re able to go home. We don’t know exactly what our journey will turn into after this initial month as it’s very dependent on the tests that they will run throughout the next couple of weeks.

Plans are very minute but minute, hour by hour right now and we don’t know when they will get better, IF they will get better, or if this is just our new reality as parents of a cancer patient.

We truly are thankful for every prayer, phone call, text message, everything. From the bottom of our hearts, thank you all. Daniel and I are completely shattered, lost, confused, overwhelmed, heartbroken and so many more things. The feelings and emotions that we have right now are impossible to put into words, but we are so thankful for everything that everyone is doing for us. We are thankful that God has led us to CHOA and we really feel that we have the absolute best care team we could ever ask for.

We have had a lot of people message us wanting to donate to help and we are going to be working on setting up accounts and possibly a gofundme in the next few days that will be used for whatever we need in regards to this process and where it takes us. I will post this information when we get it all available.

Again, thank you to every single person who has read this, texted, called, sent their well wishes, prayed for our family, or donated. We love all of you.

*Post from May 8,2023*

5/8 Update on Beau:

His procedure went well this morning and they were able to place the central line and do the bone marrow biopsy. After he got back from the OR he was very swollen. This was not alarming to the care team considering the amount of fluids that he has received over the last 3 days, but it was definitely an unexpected and difficult thing for us to see. He’s been on medication today that helps with the swelling. We had quite a few conversations with the oncology team today considering treatment options and received lots of information to help us make the right choices for him. His oxygen levels and breathing have kind of been all over the place today and gave us one good scare but the past couple of hours he has been maintaining high 90’s. They started the first chemotherapy treatment at 8:30 and it took about 2 hours. He has done good with this so far. We will do chemo again tomorrow morning.

During the day I am not responding to very many messages but I will try to clear them out and respond at the end of each day. We have a lot of people asking about donations and we are working on setting up donation accounts.

Thank you all for the prayers, calls, and messages. ❤️