For 852 days, Kristen Dement watched her only son fight a battle no child should ever face. Now, after more than two years of treatments and uncertainty, 5-year-old Colton Gower is cancer-free.
In the fall of 2023, doctors told Dement that Colton had a bad case of bronchitis. In a previous interview with the Springtown Epigraph, Dement said she rushed her son to Cook Children’s Hospital after Colton started to look extremely pale one day.
But on Nov. 9, 2023, Dement received the scariest diagnosis a child could get. Colton was diagnosed with a form of leukemia called mixed-phenotype acute leukemia. This is a rare type of leukemia where cancerous cells show characteristics of both acute myeloid leukemia and acute lymphoblastic leukemia. This means the leukemia cells show markers of both myeloid and lymphoid lineages.
