When he was 13, Carter began showing signs of fatigue and loss of appetite.
“At first, it didn’t really seem out of the ordinary, because we were in the middle of moving,” his mom Ashley said. “He just was really tired all the time. He couldn’t keep his eyes open for anything. If he sat down for even more than just a couple minutes, he was falling asleep.”
But then Carter began losing his appetite — something unusual for a 13-year-old boy.
“He went from being a bottomless pit to not being able to finish even the smallest of meals,” Ashley said.
Ashley and her husband, John, planned to get Carter to a doctor to be checked out. On a Sunday night, Carter went to spend the night at his grandmother’s house. His grandmother noticed a swollen lymph node on the back of his neck.
His parents decided to pick him up and take him to an urgent care center, but the facility did not have the ability to do blood work.
The family then went to the emergency room at Texas Health in Willow Park.
Ashley insisted on getting blood work done.
“That’s when the doctor came back in and told us he had cancer,” Ashley said.
Carter was diagnosed with lymphocytic leukemia – a cancer that targets blood and bone marrow. At the emergency room, the doctors came back with an abnormally high white blood cell count of 500,000. After predicting that the cell count could be cancer, they put a transfer into Cook Children’s Hospital where Carter went through with his treatment.
Starting with his first round of chemotherapy March 15, 2022, Carter’s white blood cell count was down to 30,000 by the next day. Ashley said she felt comfortable with the team they had.
“I mean, I was a mess,” Ashley said. “If there weren’t people there for me to lean on and ask questions when I needed to, I can’t imagine how much harder it would have been to get through it.”
The oncologist Carter had started his treatment with ended up beginning his own practice, leaving them with the difficult choice of deciding who their next doctor was going to be.
“That was really hard for us because he had our trust, we trusted him fully with our son’s care,” Ashley said. “We liked his new oncologist, we just didn’t feel like we had the same personal connection as we did with his first oncologist.”
They ended up choosing Dr. Kenneth Heym in hopes of keeping their original nurse, Courtney.
“She played a huge part in his treatment, we just love her,” Ashley said. “When we found out what doctor she was switching to we were like ‘Okay well that’s where we have to go.’”
Ashley had started the Cure for Carter facebook page when Carter was diagnosed in 2022 with help from her stepsister, a nurse at Baylor Scott & White Health.
“We didn’t just start the page for the fundraiser,” Ashley said. “It was also to rally prayers from friends and family and anybody that we could get his story out to. We wanted to have as many people as possible praying for him.”
On top of a multitude of prayers, that Thanksgiving Carter was chosen as the recipient of the Thanksgiving Trot held yearly to help struggling families. Each year, a board of volunteers voted on who they believed would be best suited as that year’s recipient.
“We were pretty shocked when we were told that he was chosen,” Ashley said. “My husband wasn’t able to work through pretty much the first half of his treatment and we have young children at home. We had to use the money to live off of for probably half a year before Carter was in a position that we could start bringing income in. In October of the same year, my husband was diagnosed with a blood clot, so that put him out of work as well.”
On the day of his final treatment, Carter received his last lumbar puncture – a procedure where a needle is inserted into the spine.
“We weren’t entirely sure how he was going to be feeling when it came time to ring the bell,” Ashley said. “That particular procedure seemed to hurt him a little more than the other times he got it done. There was a possibility that he may not even have gotten to ring the bell that day. It was kind of surreal that we had gone through everything we’d gone through and we were finally at the end.”
Finally after those three years, Carter is able to enjoy the things he loves most and now he is even driving.
“He’s a bright kid,” Ashley said. “He’s got probably one of the best hearts of anybody I’ve ever met. I think he has a bright future.”
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