For the majority of his life, he’s been undergoing cancer treatments. But after 39 months of chemotherapy, 5-year-old Braxton Anjo of Huron was finally able to ring the bell at Strong Memorial Hospital, signifying the end of his treatment.
Braxton was diagnosed in September of 2013 with Acute lymphoblastic leukemia, a form of cancer of the white blood cells. At the time of his diagnosis, he was 2 years old.
According to his mother, Chelsey Anjo, the diagnosis came out of nowhere. She first started sensing something wasn’t right when Braxton came down with a fever and was getting up multiple times throughout the night. She took him to a couple of local pediatricians, who told them that it was nothing of concern and sent them home.
Still she could tell something was wrong, so she and her husband, Mark, decided to take to Braxton to the emergency room. After doing some blood tests, Chelsey said that were put in an ambulance and sent to Strong Memorial Hospital with little information as to why. To her surprise, they were told that Braxton would have to be admitted.
“A nurse came in with tears in her eyes and told us that we were being sent to the pediatric chemo floor, and we were going to start hearing words like leukemia, cancer and blood cancer,” Chelsey said. “She was crying, and the room just went silent.”
They were told that there was nothing they could’ve done differently to prevent Braxton’s sickness.
“There was no warning, no genetics – it was just a misfire,” Chelsey explained. “It’s not because Mark and I had a baby together, it was just really, really bad luck.”
Although he is done with chemotherapy, Braxton will continue to go to Golisano Children’s Hospital – where he received all of his treatment – once a month for several months to make sure the cancer isn’t returning. After that, they hope that he can have his chemotherapy port removed, which is a button-sized implant under his skin where the chemotherapy medicine was injected.
They hope that ultimately he’ll only have to go to the clinic once a year. Chelsey said that he will have to be monitored for the rest of his life.
“When he was trying to grow in some of the most important years of his life, we were kind of blasting him with this chemotherapy or poison, and there could be side effects from that throughout his whole life,” she said.
Braxton was supposed to begin kindergarten at the start of the current school year, but, because of his treatment, his parents enrolled him in a part-time pre-K program instead. They are planning for him to start kindergarten next year.
Since Braxton was diagnosed, Chelsey said the hardest part for her and Mark was just watching their son go through all of the ups and downs of chemotherapy without being able to do anything about it. And with him being as young as he was, Braxton didn’t understand why they were giving him medicine that made him sick.
“It’s hard to explain to a kid that these are the things we have to do to fix you, but at the same time it all sucks,” Chelsey said.
But she also said that she thinks that Braxton’s age also helped him keep a positive outlook throughout the treatment because he didn’t feel the same anxiety and uncertainty that an adult or teenager might have. “On one hand, I’m very upset that it had to happen to him at two years old,” Chelsey acknowledged. “But at the same time, I think it has helped a lot with his healing because he wasn’t scared of what might happen tomorrow or what it actually means to have cancer.”
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