When Kaelyn O'Brien couldn't walk down the hallway and her speech became slurred one morning, her parents thought their 11-year-old daughter was having a stroke.

"She was a very healthy kid, no issues," says Kaelyn's mom, Tammy. "Everything was perfectly fine up until that point. She mentioned having a headache earlier in the week and we assumed it was a migraine, but that Saturday morning, everything felt different."

Tammy and her husband, Mike, rushed Kaelyn to their local emergency room, where tests seemed to show nothing out of the ordinary.

"Their first thought was that she was having a stroke," Tammy says. "But nothing was coming back to indicate that."

Kaelyn was transferred by ambulance for further evaluation to University of Iowa Health Care Stead Family Children's Hospital, where the imaging tests were repeated.

"The neurologic symptoms were so strange that it was baffling everyone," Tammy says, but during an exam, a resident physician noticed something unusual on her neck, which led to a chest scan.

"That decision changed everything," she says. The scan revealed a mass on Kaelyn's right lung, and more tests quickly followed. "That afternoon, we heard the words no parent is ever prepared for. They believed Kaelyn had cancer."

Further tests confirmed that Kaelyn had Hodgkin lymphoma, a cancer that develops in the immune system. In addition to the mass on her lung, an abnormality was detected in a lymph node, which is what the resident had noticed in the earlier exam.

Because of the damage to her cerebellum, Kaelyn had to relearn skills that once came naturally. During treatment, she spent countless hours in physical therapy and occupational therapy, working tirelessly to regain her balance, walk independently, and rebuild the fine motor skills that had been affected.

Kaelyn graduated from a wheelchair to a walker as she regained her skills and eventually was able to walk on her own. Swimming also helped her regain leg strength, Mike says.

After two chemotherapy cycles, a PET scan showed no evidence of disease, but Kaelyn completed the final two cycles to ensure no cancer cells remained. On Aug. 30, 2024, just two weeks after starting sixth grade, Kaelyn rang the bell marking the end of treatment.

Kaelyn's cancer is now in remission, and she is returning to the activities she loves, including volleyball, basketball, and softball. She had planned to pitch for her softball team when she first became ill, and the team also has been supportive during her treatments.

Kaelyn also enrolled in a research study about paraneoplastic syndrome to help other people, she says.

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