IOWA CITY, Iowa — Carter Schmidt had been healthy until he was 9 months old, when his mother, Tiffany, and his day care provider noticed he was pale, lethargic, and not eating. A blood draw taken at his local doctor’s office showed a high white blood cell count and low red blood cells. It also indicated a disease that his mother never thought possible.
“He said Carter might have leukemia,” she recalls. “They said we’d have to go to Iowa City immediately and that’s when we knew it was serious.”
Specialists at University of Iowa Health Care Stead Family Children’s Hospital diagnosed Carter with juvenile myelomonocytic leukemia (JMML), a rare cancer of the blood that affects just one in 1.2 million children.
Read Carter’s story here.