Hi, my name is Sherwood. I was 10 months old when I was diagnosed with Stage 5 Neuroblastoma. The doctors say that I was a high risk. I went through 6 sessions of Chemotherapy to reduce my tumor from being big to being small so that the doctor would be able to remove it from my adrenal gland. I then got my scans to see how much progress was made after the chemotherapy drugs and the doctors were happy to say that it had been reduced drastically.
The next step was to have surgery to take out the remaining tumor that was left on my adrenal gland and they removed 95% of it. They said that the tumor was the size of a lemon. The next step in my treatment was to have proton therapy. This is also known as Radiation Therapy. This was used to take away the rest of the tumor that they couldn’t remove during the surgery. I went through 2 weeks of proton therapy and the doctors declared it a success.
The next step in my treatment was stem cell therapy. I had to have 2 sessions of stem cells transplanted to wipe out all of cancer cells in my body and to replace them with non-cancerous cells in my body. This took two months of intensive therapy to complete. When that was done, I was back at home to rest up for the final step of my treatment course.
The final treatment needed was immunotherapy which I had six sessions of that. After that, it was back at home to rest my body after all the treatments I have been through. My next checkup was with the doctor, and we repeated the scans to see what the results were from all of my treatments. The Doctors were very excited after looking through the scans to tell us that I am cancer free. My side effects were that I now have a loss of hearing because of the intense chemotherapy that I been through. The Audiologist says that I will need hearing aids as well as speech therapy.
I am a typical boy who is wild little man and loves to play hot wheels and play pillow fights and loves to cuddle with mommy and daddy and love to help out as well. I’m a very awesome little man and am grateful to the doctors to who got me to where I am today.