Trevor Bland’s battle against leukemia

September is recognized nationally as Childhood Cancer Awareness Month, but for moms like Jamie Hibbitts, it’s an ongoing awareness that erases the boundaries on calendar months. So although a new month has begun, the battle she fights alongside her son continues.

Thursday marked 21 days that Hibbitts has been by her son’s bedside in the ICU of Beverly Knight Olson Children’s Hospital in Macon while he fights the effects of Acute Lymphoblastic Leukemia. Trevor Bland, now 17 years old, was a very active junior at Warner Robins High School where he played on the Warner Robins Demons baseball team. However, in November of 2019, everything changed. That’s when he went from helping his teammates fight opposing teams on a baseball field to fighting childhood cancer.

“He was 16 years old at the time,” Hibbitts recalled. “It just kind of hit us out of nowhere.”

At some point, Bland began feeling bouts of fatigue, lightheadedness and fevers. He took it upon himself to do a Google search of his symptoms, and when he did, leukemia came up as a diagnosis. And it turned out to be a correct one. The process of events that happened next resulted in him having to leave his beloved baseball team and miss most of his junior year of high school.

Last month (September) Bland’s battle became an uphill one on a level that neither he nor his family had faced previously.

“He came down with an infection,” Hibbitts shared. “He got chemo on September 9, and we stayed overnight because he needed blood and platelets. The process was just going to take so long that we just stayed. The next day, he was released, but within three hours, he was fighting a fever because he had a staph infection that became sepsis. He’s been in ICU ever since.”

It was a turn of events that the Hibbitts and Bland families had not expected, and they had to make some quick and unplanned adjustments that included Hibbitts spending most of her time at the hospital, while her husband became the primary caretaker for the other children and the home.

“Childhood cancer doesn’t just affect the child with cancer; it affects everyone in the family. My other children miss their brother and their mama. They have only seen me three times in the last 21 days and that was for an hour or so. My husband has had 100% responsibility of the household and has played both mom and dad since I have been at the hospital with Trevor.”

At the beginning of Bland’s admission into ICU, Hibbitts said only one person was allowed in the room to see him; so, there were times when she and her ex-husband (Bland’s father) would swap out.

“But then when they intubated Trevor two Saturdays ago,” she said, “they had to do a CT scan because they were worried about some bleeding on the brain. Thankfully, there was none, but they let his dad come up then. So there have been two of us in here with him at times. No other visitors are allowed.”

Hibbitts admits that it’s been somewhat of a rollercoaster journey. “He’s currently on a ventilator. Saturday [October 3] will be two weeks that he’s been intubated. He just got off the kidney dialysis machine yesterday. He’s been on that for about a week and a half. Every day, he’s improving, but he’s had some setbacks as well.”

Communication with Bland during this time has been limited due to his intubation, but Hibbitts shared that there are some days when he uses alternative means to share his thoughts.

“He can’t actually talk, but he does the ‘I love you’ sign with his hands, and he’ll give us a thumbs-up,” she expressed, adding that there are some days where her son is more alert than others. “We have really good days, and other days he’s not very responsive. I think at this point, he has his days and nights mixed up. He likes to stay up during the night and sleeps a lot during the day. He can write. He’s been responding to us by writing messages. Last Monday, he had a really good day, and he text his girlfriend on his own. We really don’t know what we’ll get from day to day.”

Bland can’t play alongside his Demons ball mates right now, but Hibbitts said that he is still in school and is now a senior at Warner Robins High. Bland is on the school’s hospital homebound program and has been since he left school in his junior year last November to come to the hospital for tests.

“He’s on the hospital homebound program, but obviously he hasn’t been able to do any school work for the last three weeks,” Hibbitts pointed out. “I’m not sure how all that’s going to work out, but the school works with us. We have a teacher that comes to the house two or three times a week.”

Hibbitts alluded to the fact that sleep doesn’t come easily for her these days. Being at the hospital and seeing what her son is going through can become stressful at times. But like any loving mother, she does it without regret.

“It’s been an adjustment for everybody,” she confessed. “You don’t realize how much it affects the other kids and the rest of the family as well. We just do what we have to do. Aside from Trevor, we have two 12-year-olds, an 18-year-old and a 22-year-old. We’re juggling all that, but we do what we can.”

Hibbitts pointed out that childhood cancer awareness in general needs more funding and more awareness. She shared that only four percent of national funding goes toward doing that. Blood and plasma donations are also crucial, and according to Hibbits, those are currently at an all-time low.

“Trevor, at one point, had received all the platelets in the hospital,” she reported. “The other day, they had to go all the way to Cordele to get platelets and bring them here because he needed a transfusion. At one point he was getting blood and platelets every day—sometimes two units of each—and getting plasma on top of that. They’ve backed off on that because his numbers are starting to recover and his bone marrow is waking up. We need more people to donate blood. They can look up the Red Cross in their area and find out about local blood drives. There are blood drives all the time.”

According to Hibbitts, doctors believe Bland will make a full recovery; it’s just going to take some time. She mentioned that because of the setback that landed him in ICU, Bland’s regular treatments are being delayed. While Hibbitts admits that knowing that is a bit scary, she said they will just pick back up where he left off once he recovers from the setback.

Above all, the Hibbitts and Bland families would like the public to know that they are so very thankful to their communities for the outpouring of love and support. They have received overwhelming support from our friends, family and even some complete strangers, and for that, they are eternally grateful.

HHJ News