Up until a couple of weeks before his diagnosis on June 13, 2010, Jacob was a completely healthy kid and in excellent physical condition. Jacob is an avid baseball fan and very competitive player and plays and trains very hard all year round.
One day after a typical workout, Jacob began complaining of some muscle pain and mild shortness of breath. We simply dismissed it as a pulled muscle. A few days later, after playing one inning of a big game, he told his coach he was in too much pain to continue playing. We then knew something must be wrong. We took him to the pediatrician the next day and they indicated it was a pulled muscle and the swelling and discomfort was causing the shortness of breath. He would need to take a few weeks off baseball to let things settle down and he would be fine.
The pain subsided, but the shortness of breath persisted. Over the next few days, he became fatigued and started to develop some swelling and puffiness in his face and just didn't seem well. All the while, he insisted he was fine.
Finally, mom knowing best, we took him in to Urgent Care and they did a chest x-ray and found he had a completely collapsed left lung. The transferred him to the local emergency room for treatment. As they began to insert a chest tube to drain the fluid from his chest and re-inflate his lung, he crashed and stopped breathing. Fortunately, they were able to quickly intubate him and rush him in for a CT scan which revealed a very large mass in his chest and smaller masses on each of his kidneys. He was transferred to Children's Hospital. The next several hours were very much touch-and-go as the ICU doctors fought to keep him alive and diagnose the mass in his chest.
He was diagnosed with Lymphoblastic Lymphoma, a very fast growing aggressive T-cell Lymphoma. After four days, he regained consciousness and began breathing on his own as the mass began to respond to treatment and reduce in size. He will undergo a 6-month cycle of chemotherapy and his prognosis is good.
