Hayden Alexander Gomez was born on June 4, 2006. He seemed to be a very healthy baby. He weighed 8lbs 5 oz at birth and was 20 inces long. He was tested for jaundice and there was an unusual reading on the test. This caused the doctors to pay very close attention to his counts and they ran a complete blood count (CBC). They discovered that Hayden was lacking netrophils. Neutrphils are a certain type of white blood cell necessary to fight bacterial infection. This condition is called Neutropenia.

They tested for Kostman’s syndrome and for Leukemia at this and both came back negative. They gave Hayden a drug called GCSF or Neuprogen. Neuprogen is a hormone that your body needs to produce neutrophils. This helped Hayden’s neutrophil count shoot through the roof. With such a nice response from the GCSF, the doctors had high hoped that Hayden would grow out of it eventually. Right before he turned 8 months old he developed an ear infection that wouldn’t go away. Andrea and Jerry felt something wasn’t right and insisted that another test be done for Leukemia.

Hayden was diagnosed with Acute Myeloid Leukemia (AML) on January 23rd, 2007. He was admitted to Kaiser Morse for a series of very aggressive chemotherapy treatments. After 7 months Hayden was in remission and released from the hospital. Unfortuately, within 2 months he relapsed and is now, once again, in the hospital undergoing chemotherapy, awaiting a bone marrow transplant. He will be transferring to Stanford Hospital in about a month for the transplant. Andrea and Jerry’s second child is due any day now and the doctors are hoping she will be a match. If she is they will use the cord blood rather than a donor.