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By Jeff Moore

Contributing writer

 

The community is showing its support for 3-year-old Kyle Bullington as he begins his battle with leukemia.

A GoFundMe page, organized by family friend Holly Mathis in early September, has already raised $6,480 through 73 donations — more than a third of the way to the $15,000 goal. The donation page for Kyle is located at gofundme.com/f/support-kyles-fight-against-leukemia.

Mathis has been a friend of Kyle’s mom, Ashley Bullington, since they were in fifth grade.

Ashley said her friend wanted to help out in some way and came up with the idea for the GoFundMe fundraiser to help the family with some of the expenses they will face. After conferring with her husband James Bullington, the couple agreed to let Mathis organize the page.

“My husband and I, we don’t typically ask ask people for money,” Ashley said in a Saturday interview. “We’re we’re normally the ones that are helping other people.”

Kyle receives weekly chemotherapy treatments at Children’s Healthcare of Atlanta, which means a lot of travel for the family.

Ashley said funds raised will help with fuel, hotel and other expenses, such as copays and deductibles tied to Kyle’s medical treatment.

“For example, his medications for this month was almost $200 just for this one,” Ashley said.

She noted insurance will not cover all the hundreds of thousands of dollars for hospital bills the family will see over the next couple of years.

For the typical child, Ashley said, running a temperature means simply treating it with Tylenol or Motrin. That’s not the case for Kyle now that he is receiving chemo. Even a mild fever requires an immediate trip to an emergency room for him.

The outpouring of support for the family has helped.

In addition to the GoFundMe page, Ashley’s friends, Andrea and Julia, have made shirts and bracelets they are selling to help out.

“We were just in such awe of the amount of people that reached out with their support and not just people that we know,” Ashley said, pointing in particular to the many who remain anonymous and others they have never met.

“People are sending him little gifts in the mail, which you know he’s a kid who loves getting stuff in the mail,” she noted. “Those little things brighten his day.”

She also is receiving good advice from others who have experienced medical issues such as this with their children.

“My kid went through this and this is what we did or this is how we handled this situation or things like that,” Ashley said. “And then just to to know that your community is behind you, that just takes a tremendous weight off of your shoulders.”

A nurse, Ashley said her boss has been great by even allowing her to work from home as much as possible, so she can be there for Kyle.

A post that Mathis shares from Ashley’s Facebook page points to the family’s shock of their child’s diagnosis.

“As parents your only wish and prayer in life is for your children to be happy, healthy and safe,” Ashley said in the post. “You never think that it will be your kid something happens to.”

 

Journey to a diagnosis

Before Kyle’s leukemia diagnosis, he enjoyed typical boy stuff such as playing outdoors, but most of all playing with heavy equipment, particularly tractors.

“He loves tractors and talking about tractors and watching tractors and riding them,” Ashley said. “Anything to do with tractors he loves. He loves any kind of trucks.

She said her youngest son is a fun-spirited boy who has always been playful and active.

This changed after the 3-year-old tripped over his blanket as Ashley was picking him up from daycare earlier this summer.

“He started crying,” she said. “I picked him up, consoled him and then we went home.”

He lay around after getting home, which she said wasn’t concerning at first because of the fall on a rather hard floor. Plus, his dad James was out of town and wouldn’t be back until late that night.

While he was restless, she put Kyle to bed at 8 p.m. as usual.

“He wakes up crying, saying my stomach hurts, and that’s kind of unusual for him,” Ashley explained. “But I thought maybe he was just saying that so he wouldn’t have to go to sleep. So from 8 o’clock to 11:30 when my husband got home, he cried.”

For her own peace of mind, she decided to take him to the ER at the hospital where she works as a nurse.

“I just thought that they would do an X-ray and really that would be it,” she said. “ It would be make me feel better.”

The doctor reviews everything her her and decides they should also do some swabs and lab work.

After the results came back, the doctor said it showed Kyle had rhinovirus — a cold — but also noted that the blood work showed the boy’s hemoglobin was low at eight. Ashley asked and the doctor told her it should have been at about 11 for a child Kyle’s age.

They went home that evening and then followed up with his pediatrician, who repeated blood work and wanted to do an outpatient ultrasound.

The hemoglobin was still low in this test and the ultrasound showed that Kyle’s spleen was enlarged. The doctor then said she would follow up on these results with a pediatric hematologist.

Ashley said a week goes by and Kyle is looking pale and is not himself. But that hematologist said it could just be the cold behind all of this.

Kyle had been crying and not himself at daycare and Ashley’s mother picked him up at daycare. She recalls that her mom said Kyle looked bad, so it was back to the ER and the pediatrician.

“He looks terrible. He’s pale,” Ashley said. “He’s saying his stomach hurts and he’s having these like on and off, almost like he has a fever, but it never would read as a fever.”

She also learned during that ER visit that Kyle’s hemoglobin  had gone down some more.

I talked to the provider, everything comes back normal,” she said, so they went home.

The next day, Ashley said she was feeling uneasy about Kyle’s condition. “There’s something not right with him,” she recalled, noting she really didn’t want to wait another week for a followup doctor’s visit.

Ashley wanted to get an appointment for Kyle at a hematologist in Altanta, but after a call there she found that would be two or three weeks out. She tries calling one in Macon, but can’t even get an appointment without a referral.

“I’m very upset, you know, I’m worried about my son,” Ashley said. “I don’t feel like I’m being helped in a timely fashion. So, I’m out there and I’m talking to some about fears and my colleagues, who we’re also nurses, and I’m like, what I need to do?”

One of the nurses told her Kyle is her son and she knows him better that anybody else, she recalled, as they also encouraged her to take him on to Atlanta so they can get to the bottom of this.

“I call my mother-in-law and load my son up and I said, ‘hey, we’re going to Atlanta,’” Ashley said. “The whole way, I’m just thinking, I cannot believe I’m doing this. I can’t believe I’m going all the way to Atlanta for them just to tell me that it’s just a virus. He’s probably fine, but at least it’ll make me feel better.”

They get to the ER, the doctor sees him, they run labs and the doctor returns telling her Kyle’s hemoglobin is now at 6.4.

“I was like, oh my gosh, that’s a lot,” she recalled, “and they want me to wait two weeks. He said, ‘You absolutely do the right thing by bringing them up here.’”

They admitted Kyle that night, giving him a blood transfusion. It was at that point she asked the doctor if it could be leukemia, but she said he told her he didn’t think so, but would check anyway.

Around 4 p.m. Saturday, just a day after going to Children’s Hospital, the doctor returned with the results and Kyle does have leukemia.

“I was in a pretty catatonic state after hearing the news…time came almost to a halt, my body was moving in slow motion, and I could barely get any words out of my mouth,” Ashley wrote in her Facebook post that is on the GoFundMe page. “After what seemed like hours of lying in bed or shuffling around the room going no where and leaving James to make all of the calls because I physically could not form the word cancer from my mouth, I decided it was time to be strong for not just Kyle but James and Kori as well and they need me, because our baby has a tough road ahead we need to be strong when he needs us the most.”

Ashley said the family is holding up pretty well at this point. She said she continues to have more trouble dealing with the diagnosis than her husband is now.

“It’s just because I’m his mom and I worry about him,” she added.

Kyle remains in good spirits, Ashley said, noting that he is eating well even though he is getting the weekly chemo treatments.

“We have a treatment coming up on Tuesday and then the next week, that next Wednesday, he has to get a lumbar puncture and a bone marrow check,” she said. “The lumbar puncture will check for any cells in his spinal fluid, which is the fluid that goes around the spine and the brain. So far, those have all been negative, but they do a series of tests just to make sure that they don’t creep in there.”

The chemo is expected to continue for two years, she noted, adding that as they track it they might change treatment if they find something is not working like the medical team believes it should.

“The biggest thing that I’ve gotten out of this, just to know that you do whatever you gotta do if it makes you feel better and you still feel like something’s not right,” Ashley said. “Pursue it until you feel comfortable with what the results are.”