“Do I need to pull over for this conversation?” Sarah Bailey remembers asking the doctor. “Yeah, I think you should,” the doctor told her. Sarah had just taken her 5-year-old daughter, Bellamy Korn, to the office the day before for swollen lymph nodes.
They had run blood tests, and called Sarah the next morning just as she dropped her four kids off at school. “I wasn’t understanding what she was saying,” Sarah remembers. “She said, I think your daughter has leukemia.
” It was a nightmare for Sarah, who immediately raced her youngest to Children’s Hospital Colorado in Aurora from their home in Timnath. There, doctors ran more tests, and confirmed the worst to be true: Bellamy had B-cell acute lymphoblastic leukemia. “They told us pretty quick,” Sarah said.
“Then we were inpatient for 11 nights. That beginning stage, which is called induction, it’s like nothing else. You’re so confused.
You’re in a state of shock. But you’re having to put on a brave face for your kid.” For the next week and a half, Sarah and Bellamy faced pain and confusion as the chemotherapy treatment ran its course.
“They start right away. They don’t screw around,” Sarah said. “As the medications started, the chemotherapy started to work with her body.
She was in immense amounts of pain, screaming ‘What is going on!’ and it’s hard to explain, she was 5 at the time. How do you explain that to a 5-year-old?” While searching for an understanding, Sarah took not.
