September is Sickle Cell Disease Awareness Month and National Childhood Cancer Awareness Month. For 40-year-old Kimberlin, both observances have very real significance.
This year alone, an estimated 500,000 children worldwide will be affected by sickle cell disease, which is the most common inherited blood disorder in the United States. About one in 500 African-American babies born in the U.S. has sickle cell disease.
Patients of sickle cell disease – which causes red blood cells to become hard and crescent-shaped, instead of soft and round – can suffer from debilitating pain, swelling, infections, stroke and life-threatening organ damage. They also may face loss of limbs and a shortened lifespan.
And while survival rates for childhood cancer have increased to more than 80 percent, 1 in 5 children diagnosed with cancer will not survive. Cancer remains the No. 1 cause of death by disease for children 14 and younger in the U.S. Nearly 16,000 children and adolescents in the U.S. will be diagnosed with cancer this year.
St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital® is a place of hope for patients like Kimberlin, who in 1982 was diagnosed with acute myeloid leukemia (AML). Her family was devastated by the news because she already suffered from sickle cell disease. For most of her life, she had experienced the intense pain and complications associated with the disease, which at the time had no known cure. Kimberlin’s doctors feared the 8-year-old girl had only six months to live and referred her to St. Jude.
At St. Jude, Kimberlin’s treatment for AML included chemotherapy and radiation therapy to prepare her body for a bone marrow transplant, which she received from her younger brother Shongo. What happened next shocked the medical community. The bone marrow transplant pushed her cancer into remission, which had always been the hope. But it also treated her sickle cell disease. This was the first time that a child with sickle cell disease had ever been cured.
Today, Kimberlin is married and the mother of three children. “Everybody at St. Jude, the doctors and the nurses, have their hearts in the right place,” said Kimberlin. “They really care about the children. They are determined to find cures and save lives.”
St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital is leading the way the world understands, treats and defeats childhood cancer and other life-threatening diseases. The hospital has one of the largest sickle cell disease programs in the country, with more than 800 patients, and the sickle cell research program at St. Jude is the only one of its kind in the nation focused solely on children.
Communities across the country can join the fight and help St. Jude Children Research Hospital continue to find cures and save children like Kimberlin, at no cost to them. To learn more visit stjude.org.
(Photo: Courtesy of St. Jude’s Hospital)
