Please join us to help our coworker Peter Thelen and his family as his grandson Alex, who also goes by "Juni" is battling cancer.

 

Alex "Juni" is 8, and on December 23, 2021, we learned he relapsed, and his Acute Lymphoblastic Leukemia had returned. He was initially diagnosed on 02/17/2017 but was in remission by summer 2020.

 

He had a 102 temp for a few days, and when they ran bloodwork, they found his counts were off, so they contacted his oncologist right away and got him transferred to Lurie’s Children’s Hospital in Chicago. His oncologist did a lumbar puncture and bone scrape. Over 80% of the cells in his spinal fluid were cancerous, and over 90% of the white blood cells in his bones were cancerous. They started him on Chemo right away and let him go home on Christmas Eve to spend Christmas with family before the aggressive treatments began. He started going once a week for chemo, checked his blood, and got a new lumbar puncture done. His sodium and potassium dropped to critical levels, and he was placed in the ICU until doctors were convinced, he would not have neuro issues or a heart attack from the low potassium. While admitted, he started coughing a lot and sneezing. They decided to run a CT and MRI scan to see if he had anything going on. They found inflammation in his sinuses spreading out. They found “scabs” in his nose and said they wanted to take him in for surgery to scrape the scab and have it checked for a fungal infection. He went in that same day, and they confirmed it was a fungal infection. They explained how life-threatening it was due to the location and that he had no immune system to fight it due to the chemo. His chemo had to be stopped, and he had to be switched to an immunotherapy medication that did not alter his other blood counts so he could fight the infection. After a couple of weeks, his left eye started to swell, so ENT decided to do another MRI and found swelling around the eye. Juni went in for another surgery and a biopsy and found that the fungus around his eye was even more life-threatening. They added extra medications and were planning on completely removing his eye to help prevent the fungus from spreading to his brain, which would cause a bigger problem.

 

Due to his history, he lived in a bubble during Covid, and cancer came back. So, he’s stuck in a hospital while only being able to have one person with him at a time. He has five siblings he can only see-through FaceTime.

The financial programs used in the first program will not allow Juni’s family to use them again as they are one-time use, and no one expected him to relapse.