Help Support Annika’s Fight Against Aplastic Anemia

Hello all.

I am starting this GoFundMe for my niece, Annika, due to an unfortunate recent diagnosis. Annika has a long journey ahead and will have a lot of medical bills coming her way. As we are not sure of how much everything will be yet, it would be one less stressful thing to think about. Any amount or share would be greatly appreciated.

Annika’s story.

Around March 22nd, Annika started to feel very lethargic. She was lightheaded and started to have a hard time standing for more than a minute. She went to the doctor at the beginning of the week to see what might be the matter. They ran labs on her to check what her issue might be. Then, once the results came in on March 27th, she was told to hurry and go to the emergency room to get a transfusion.

Once she was there, they ran more blood work on her to verify the tests. They could not believe the results since they had never seen levels that low before. So, they kept continuing to run more tests to verify until she was finally given a total of 5 bags of blood and a bag of platelets to relieve her 2.6 hemoglobin and 3 platelets.

Then, while helping her with that, they started to work on the root issue for her condition. They slowly started to rule out possible causes and decided that she would need a bone marrow biopsy. So, she did have that done the next day as an emergency test. Since she was now stable and was only awaiting results, they finally let her go home after 5 days.

Then, on 4/2, she did receive the notice that she has been diagnosed with aplastic anemia (a very rare autoimmune disease) that her immune system started to attack her bone marrow, resulting in her no longer making her own blood. She was referred to Rush for a transplant.

She is now starting to work on the process of getting a stem cell transplant. This will require her to be hospitalized for at least 3 weeks while she receives chemo and radiation to kill what is left of her bone marrow, receive the transplant, and then make sure that her body does not reject it. Then, once she is released, she will need to live in local housing to be watched for graft vs. host disease for about another 3 months.

Unfortunately, this will all cause her to delay her “in-person” classes as she starts college this fall at Carthage. This is something that she has worked so hard for her whole life and is devastated at the timing of this event. We are going to try to make the best of this while she is having to isolate herself due to low immunity from the transplant and being on immune suppressants.