PHOENIX — Five-year-old Blakely Ensign is, by all accounts, a girly girl.
“What were your favorite toys to play with?” she was asked in a recent interview.
“Barbie,” Blakley responded.
"How many do you have?"
“I don’t know…, like, 20.”
The spunky, sassy little girl deserves every one of them after what she has endured. Two years ago, when Blakely was 3, her parents rushed her to the emergency room, believing she had a severe ear infection.
“At the time, we thought she just needed a different antibiotic,” her mother, Kelsey Ensign, said. “They took her blood to find out that she actually had acute myeloid leukemia, which is an aggressive form of childhood cancer.”
Doctors told the family to get Blakely to Phoenix Children’s Hospital, where the news grew even more serious.
“The doctors took extensive tests to be able to tell us that she was considered high risk, meaning she would need a bone marrow transplant to save her life,” Ensign said.
Fortunately, they were in the right place. Since 2003, Phoenix Children’s, in partnership with Mayo Clinic, has performed bone marrow transplants under a program launched by Dr. Roberta H. Adams.
“The goal was to build a pediatric bone marrow transplant program that would allow patients in the Valley and throughout the state to stay within the state and receive the care that they needed,” Adams said.
In the 22 years since the program began, Phoenix Children’s has expanded the scope and complexity of the transplants it performs.
“The transplants that we do now, only about 50% of them are for cancers,” Adams said. “And 50% of them are to treat patients who have life-threatening and quality–of–life–impacting, but not necessarily immediately fatal, diseases.”
Now preparing to help facilitate the hospital’s 700th transplant, Adams is also preparing to retire.
“I’m proud that we have been able to care for and have such an impact on so many children and their families,” she said. “And that we have been able to do that in as caring and high-quality a fashion as possible.”
For the Ensign family, that care changed everything, allowing Blakely to return to simply being a kid.
When asked what she likes to tell people she did to cancer? Blakely answered simply, “kicked its butt!”
“Blakely is now doing great,” her mother said. “She is sassy and spunky as ever. She is now in kindergarten and is learning and having fun right alongside her classmates.”
