Tonight, PBS documentary features State College girl’s cancer story
(Harrisburg) — For the past two nights on WITF-TV, cancer has been in the spotlight, with a six-hour documentary about the disease and treatment.
Tonight, “Cancer: The Emperor of All Maladies” will focus on a young girl from the midstate.
State College’s Emily Whitehead is thought to be the first cancer patient to be successfully treated with a promising method.
I talked with her father Tom Whitehead about her story.
The Whitehead family visits WITF.
Can you take me through Emily’s journey to today?
So in May 28th, 2010, she woke up with severe leg pain and we ended up taking her to see her pediatrician who she had just seen like two weeks earlier and got a good healthy physical, we took her back that morning. By that afternoon, we were in the Hershey Medical Center diagnosed with acute lymphoblastic leukemia. She did get into remission and she fought through that induction phase and she stayed in remission for 16 months.
So we returned to the Hershey Medical Center and they confirmed that she indeed was in full relapse and that it was very rare for a child that responded so well to chemotherapy in the beginning to still be in treatment and relapse.
They had asked the donor to come in in February 2012, the donor had delayed and said they weren’t available until the last week. Two weeks into that delay, they checked her bone marrow to make sure she was ready to go for the transplant, and come back and said unfortunately, she’s relapsed again.
So we transferred back down to the Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia and it was just at thte right time that all the paperwork had been cleared for them to try this t-cell therapy for the first time on a child. So they grew her cells, they put them back into her, and then she had a very adverse reaction becuase she had so much cancer inside of her. It was killing so much cancer so fast it overwhelmed her system and she ended up on a ventilator for 14 days.
She finally fought her way through that and came off the ventilator and woke up on her 7th birthday, and we found out on May 10th of 2012 that she was indeed cancer free.
Now when you see her you can’t tell that anything had even happened to her if you didn’t know.
Emily’s story has inspired quite a following – a facebook page with more than 27,000 likes, a New York Times article, a visit to the White House – why do you think people have been attracted to it?
I know there’s so many families that run out of options now that I believe it’s given them hope. And we still get calls from all over the world from families that are looking for a trial that normal treatments aren’t working for and I think people maybe see a hope in maybe the beginning of the end of cancer.
How do you hope Emily’s story inspires donors to fund the treatment?
Well that’s what we’re doing every day and spread that awareness and the reason we started the Emily Whitehead Foundation, because we see that this is a game-changer and the doctors have said it’s the biggest step forward ever, and they now feel like they can train the immune system for solid tumor cancers, all of them, and they just need the funds to get these trials going, and it takes a lot of money. So we’re working hard to get donors to do that for the private part, we’ve talked to Doctor Francis Collins at the National Institutes of Health to bring in more government funding, and we have big pharmaceutical companies getting on board, but it’s going to take everybody donating to eradicate cancer. We’re just trying to spread that awareness and tell them about the revolution that’s going on.
What’s the message you share to those who may not have ever considered helping, or put it off for one reason or another?
Our world got turned upside down, one day we had a healthy little girl and the next day she had cancer. What we’re trying to do is make a difference now, and many families that haven’t donated before said that they had kids and they don’t want to see kids suffer anymore. So really it’s already been bringing more people to the table to donate that haven’t before.
Just watching the suffering that Emily went through, and the brutal treatment that she had, and knowing that there’s hope for a lot more kids now. They’re having a 90% success rate with the kids they’ve treated that get into initial remission, and these are all kids that would pass away.
We want people to donate now before it affects your family.
What do you want people to take away from tonight’s documentary (9 PM on WITF-TV)?
That there is hope. That there’s a very good possibility eventually cancer’s not going to be taking so many lives, and if you just keep fighting and believe, that good things can happen.
