A
ble to laugh about it these days, 35-year-old Wesley
“Wes” White says getting cancer was both the worst
and best thing that ever happened to him. Through his
battle with AML Leukemia, he met the love of his life. His
journey through terror to health and love began in 2013
with a stomach pain.
“I went to a sketchy gas station to get a breakfast burri-
to and there was something hard in it which ended up, by
the grace of God, saving my life,” he said. “It perforated
my colon and I had a CT scan [done], which is what led
them to find the cancer. Actually, I was stubborn and it
took me about four or five days to go see my doctor —
just kept dealing with it — and when I went to see him
he said I needed a CT scan. I went down there and 45
minutes later they told me to get to the hospital.”
At 30 years old, he heard the word everyone dreads:
cancer. “They said, ‘Hey, you’ve got a hole in your gut
and you’ve got leukemia,’” Wes said, adding that the
prognosis was about four months to live without interven-
tion. The effect of those words, Wes said, was indescrib-
able. He desperately needed a stem cell transplant and
was fortunate enough to receive a cutting-edge procedure.
“I got a stem cell transplant that less than 1 percent of
the population has ever gotten; there are five of us in the
world,” he said.
Within the same timeframe, another 30-year-old, April
Ingram, experienced an intense pain in her leg. It was the
day after Valentine’s Day 2013. Upon visiting the ER, she
too heard devastating words: “It looks like leukemia,” the
doctor said. The disease (ALL Lymphoma Leukemia) was
advanced and aggressive and she needed immediate treat-
ment.
“For a year things had been going wrong,” she
recalled. “So I knew something was not right. I was going
to the gym and started falling behind because I was very
tired and extremely short of breath. The whole year I’d
been going to every single kind of doctor, every single
body part doctor you can go to.”
“We both ended up at Harris Hospital in Fort Worth
on the seventh floor — still didn’t know each other —
getting treatment at the same time,” Wes recalled. “They
were trying to get my stomach under control and fix the
hole and treat me for cancer as well, which was making
it really difficult to do.” But the chemo “blasts” failed and
both Wes and April were sent to Baylor Sammons Cancer
Center in Dallas, ending up just rooms apart. Top docs
brought their cancers under control so they could undergo
stem cell transplants.
“When we finally got let out of the hospital I went
back for some treatment and noticed her in the waiting
room,” said Wes. “I thought she was pretty then.”
A year later, Wes was asked to speak about his
“wave-of-the-future” transplant at the Leukemia Society’s
Survivors Ball at Baylor. Again their paths crossed.
He noticed April exiting an elevator and during the
program saw her sitting in the audience front and center.
“I just kept making eye contact with her and thinking
‘man, that girl is pretty!’ So, when I’d finished speaking
White’s Funeral Home
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Kari Drake, Andy Browning, Anita White, Ken Corzine, Bob White, Richard Woodman, Jillian Johnston, Bruce Duncan, Robert Sheffield
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