Support Daylen's Battle with Leukemia

Back in Nov 2023, our son Daylen was diagnosed with B-ALL leukemia while living in FL with a friend. We quickly brought him back to Kauai and proceeded to have treatment on Oahu. Long story short, before moving back to NC, we were told he was in remission and that we were down to doing maintenance chemo for a couple of years. We then came back to NC in Feb 2025 and got connected with the ECU cancer center in Greenville. Come to find out, he was not in remission, nor did he really have the treatment he needed to be cured of the leukemia. More blood testing and another bone marrow biopsy was done by his new oncologist to determine the status of the leukemia.

With the current results back, his oncologist feels in order to cure Daylen of the leukemia, we will need to start inpatient chemo May 15th with a bone marrow transplant in the near future. He will have to endure many inpatient chemo cycles in order to put him in the remission phase needed for transplant. There is no exact timeframe for these treatment cycles. Remission will be tracked by doing blood work and bone marrow biopsies between the treatments.

Once he is in “remission,” a bone marrow transplant will be done when a matched donor is found. This will involve a minimum of 3 months in Chapel Hill with our family attending to his care daily as well as the medical needs associated with a bone marrow transplant. We had our first appointment at UNC Chapel Hill on 5/7, which is where the transplant will take place. His transplant doctor, Dr. Meier, and his team were very thorough with the transplant process and spent over an hour with us answering questions and providing us with so much information!

We all thought that we were “out of the woods,” so to speak, so this is a shock for all of us. Daylen was just getting back to feeling “normal,” having started a new job in March, which he has now had to quit because of the amount of time that is needed for this treatment/transplant, not to mention him being put in a very immunocompromised status.

Any money donated will go to helping our family with a place to stay for the 3 months Daylen will be in Chapel Hill, as well as food, bills, gas to and from appointments (Chapel Hill is 3 hours away from our home), and any other necessities during the transplant. We don’t like to ask for help, but 2 out of 3 of our family members being out of work for that time period will inevitably be a strain on our family. We cannot thank everyone enough for the calls, texts, prayers, and well wishes we have received since making this public.