Family Stories
Hospital Spotlight: The Guzman’s, Still Kicking
Before fall of 2008, Tyler Guzman, 12, trained with his soccer team five days a week. He did not miss a day of school in three years. His mother, Stacey Guzman, described him as in “perfect health.”
One day Tyler developed an intense fever after harboring an illness for two weeks. He grew pale. Walking short distances tired him out. Tyler’s pediatrician diagnosed him first with Mononucleosis, then with Lyme’s disease, since the Guzman’s live in Fallston, Md. where deer ticks are prevalent.
“In the midst of this I decided to go online and type in his symptoms,” says Stacey. “And yes, everything led to mono, but it also kept coming back to the word: ‘leukemia’.”
After a second round of blood work, on Wednesday, October 15, at 2:50 p.m., Stacey received a phone call at work telling her only that she needed to bring her son to Hopkins. They were waiting for her.
“Instantly I knew, hung up the phone, and cried,” says Stacey of Tyler’s initial leukemia diagnosis.
In the weeks and months to come, the family would struggle with their individual coping mechanisms to see Tyler through treatment. Before long, they found one common way to cope: The Believe In Tomorrow House at St. Casimir, a place that served as a symbol of normalcy and a rendez-vous point for the Guzmans, who all kept busy schedules. Now, the house and the foundation have the 12-year-old sports fanatic looking for ways to give back.
The Diagnosis
Within an hour and a half of bringing Tyler to the Johns Hopkins Hospital, Stacey says the “white coats” – with oncology embroidered on their chests - entered the room. The doctors informed the Guzmans that their son had a rare mixed leukemia, a combination of 90 percent acute lymphoblastic leukemia (ALL) and 10 percent acute myelogenous leukemia (AML). Stacey immediately sent the doctors back to her son’s room to inform Tyler.
The doctor asked Tyler if he had ever heard of the word leukemia.
Tyler’s response: “Oh no. No cancer.”
When Tyler asked the doctor if he was going to die, Stacey says she heard an unexpected response from the doctor: “Tyler, we’re all going to die one day. Our goal is to help you live a very productive and healthy life.”
And then he told Tyler he would be back on the soccer field one day.
Learning to Cope
Tyler told his family he did not want to hear the word “cancer” or “leukemia” while undergoing treatment. Instead he preferred to call the illness his “challenge.”
His mother reacted differently to the around the clock chemo. Stacey says she stayed at the hospital for 28 days and cried all night in a chair at her son’s bedside.
“My son says, ‘You need to get that chair out of the room. That’s your crying chair.’ So I did.”
Tyler’s father, Michael Guzman, is also a Baltimore city police officer. His work schedule usually runs from 6 p.m. to 2 a.m. With only one parent permitted in the hospital overnight, the inability to sleep in the same place as his son was beginning to wear on him.
And then day 38 came. Tyler was in remission, but would likely need a bone marrow transplant. He received the transplant February 9, slept 18 hours a day, and on day 22 after the transplant he was allowed to check out of the hospital.
“It was amazing the recovery from the day he left the hospital to the day he entered there [The Believe In Tomorrow House at St. Casimir],” says Stacey.
Nearing the end of the hospital stay the Guzman’s received a phone call from a social worker alerting them to the Hospital Housing program at Believe In Tomorrow. They filled out the paperwork and moved in the next day.
The Believe In Tomorrow House at St. Casimir became the biggest healer of them all. Stacey had all the amenities of her large kitchen at home. Tyler would tell nervous families who were moving to St. Casimir about cable, the elevator, wireless Internet, and that they were walking distance to Blockbuster. Michael finally got to sleep in the same place as his son.
“Being home [in Fallston] would have been a major issue with my father [Tyler’s grandfather] as a caretaker during the day while my husband and I went to work,” says Stacey. “It would take him an hour to get to the hospital from home.”
Instead the family stayed a ten-minute drive to the hospital while Tyler recovered from the transplant. Stacey runs Chris’s Seafood House on Canton Square, so she could run home from work at a moment’s notice if Tyler became ill. She also took Tyler for walks along the waterfront after 10 p.m., when most of the people and threats to Tyler’s immune system had cleared.
Tyler, as an only child, also had friends over at St. Casimir for Spring Break. The boys went to the back courtyard and garden to kick around a soccer ball.
Says Stacey, simply: “It provided a normal life.”
The Healing
Bone marrow transplant patients usually must stay within a fifteen minute drive of the hospital for 100 days or more post-transplant. Tyler had to get an unrelated donor for his transplant, so doctors expected several complications.
Instead, after day 77, doctors told the Guzman’s to start getting their Fallston house ready to move into.
Today, only a month later, doctor’s visits are down to one day a week and every result is coming back promising. Tyler is trying to get back in shape for soccer.
“He flew through it, he has been positive through the whole thing. He wants to give back. He wants to start a foundation.”
Tyler is not quite sure what he will do with donations he received while in treatment, but he has already made 17 Easter baskets for critically ill kids, and wants to start collecting videos and video games for patients.
While Mom and Dad serve as a support system, Tyler leads the way through the healing process with the help of those crucial months at St. Casimir.
Says Stacey: “It’s taken a 12-year-old to put it back into reality that he’s not going to let this fight him.”