At 7, Penelope Faced Acute Leukemia. At 13, She's Embracing Life

At 13, Penelope Vidal has a pretty good idea of what makes for a good day. 

“I love volleyball, shopping, eating and basically sleeping,” she says.
 
It’s a wonderfully ordinary list for a teenager whose childhood has been anything but ordinary.
 
Six years ago, when Penelope was just 7, she went from running around and playing with her brother, painting and tagging along on errands with her mother to suddenly feeling exhausted, weak and achy all over.
 
“I felt like I was tired, like I wanted to sleep,” Penelope recalls. “I had a horrible ache just everywhere in my body. I felt very weak.”
 
Her symptoms eventually brought her to the pediatric emergency room, where she met Doured Daghistani, M.D., pediatric hematologist/oncologist at Baptist Health Herbert Wertheim Cancer Institute and medical director of pediatric oncology at Baptist Children’s Hospital.
 

Watch now: Diagnosed with acute lymphoblastic leukemia at just 7 years old, Penelope Vidal endured years of treatment with the support of her family and her pediatric cancer care team at Baptist Health Herbert Wertheim Cancer Institute. Now 13 and embracing everyday teenage life, she shares her journey—and the hope she wants to give other children facing cancer. Video by Kenneth Kung, Baptist Health
 
Dr. Daghistani—“Dr. D” to his young patients—remembers that meeting well.
 
“She was very sick,” he recalls. “I met the family and met Penelope, and then we admitted her to the hospital, made the diagnosis and started treatment.”
 
Penelope had acute lymphoblastic leukemia (ALL), the most common type of childhood leukemia.

For a 7-year-old, however, words like “acute lymphoblastic leukemia” carried little meaning.
 
“At the time, I didn’t think that leukemia was that big because I was only seven and I didn’t know any cancer types,” Penelope says. “So, I just thought that it was going to be over in a second. I didn’t know it was going to be a whole journey.”

‘She Is My Body Part’

If Penelope didn’t yet understand the journey ahead, she did know one thing: Her mother was there.
 
“And with my mom there, it was very comforting,” she says.
 
That bond would become one of Penelope’s anchors as treatment stretched on and ordinary childhood routines gave way to chemotherapy, appointments and the physical and emotional challenges of cancer.
 
Asked who helped her most, Penelope doesn’t hesitate.
 
“My mom, because she really was always there for me,” she says. “She would bring me food if I was hungry. She would stay with me, cry with me. She’s attached to me. She is my body part.”

Her mother was also her favorite conversation partner and distraction. When Penelope needed to take her mind off treatment, they would “chit-chat.” And when words weren’t enough, Penelope turned to something she had loved before her diagnosis: painting.
 
“I stayed positive because I would just chit-chat with my mom. I would paint,” she says. “I would just get myself distracted from everything else so that I wouldn’t feel the aches, the pains, the headaches, anything like that.”
 
Painting became more than a diversion.
 
“I could kind of draw out my emotions onto the paper,” Penelope says. “Let it all just draw onto the paper—so I wouldn’t be focused on, ‘When’s my next appointment? How’s it going to go?’”

Getting Through the ‘Tornado’ Together

Dr. Daghistani understands how completely a cancer diagnosis can transform a child’s world—and their family’s.
 
“When you have a child with cancer, it’s not only the child who is affected,” he says. “It’s really the whole family.”
 
That is why pediatric cancer care at Baptist Health surrounds families with support that goes beyond treating the disease itself. The Pediatric Oncology Support Team includes child life specialists, social workers, pediatric psychologists and other professionals who help children and families navigate the disruptions, fears and stresses that can accompany treatment.
 
Dr. Daghistani has a metaphor he often shares with parents at the beginning of that journey.
 
“I tell families, ‘You’re going to go through a tornado. We’re going to hold your hand and get you through that tornado,’” he says.
 
For Penelope, the people surrounding her during treatment made even the most difficult days a little brighter.
 
“Dr. Daghistani and his team were so special because they were very kind and they were patient with me,” she says. “I feel like they were just like a little ball of sunshine following me everywhere.”
 
It is a description that captures the relationship Dr. Daghistani strives to build with young patients and their families. When a child arrives with suspected acute leukemia, he says, his role begins with confirming the diagnosis, explaining it to the family and determining the treatment plan. But the relationship doesn’t end when treatment does.
 
“I’m basically like the captain of the ship in deciding on the child’s treatment and being with the child and family through the whole course of treatment,” he says. “And when we finish treatment, we continue to follow these patients for a long time through long-term survivorship.”

A Childhood Interrupted—and Reclaimed

For children diagnosed with ALL today, there is more reason for optimism than ever before. 
 
Dr. Daghistani says survival for childhood ALL is now approximately 90 to 95 percent, the result of decades of advances in treatment and a greater ability to tailor therapy to an individual child’s disease.
 
Physicians consider factors such as age, white blood cell count and how a child initially presents, along with chromosomal abnormalities and genetic studies, to determine risk and guide treatment.
 
The progress is especially striking to Dr. Daghistani, who has watched pediatric oncology evolve over the course of his career.

“When I was training as a resident and fellow, I used to sit with families and tell them the chance of a cure was around 60 percent,” he says. “Go forward 30 or 40 years, and now the chance of a cure is around 95 percent. We’ve come a very, very long way.”
 
Yet statistics tell only part of the story.
 
For a child, cancer treatment can mean long hospital stays, separation from friends and school and changes that make it difficult to feel like everyone else.

Penelope remembers being particularly self-conscious about losing her hair. Seeing it grow back has become another marker of how far she has come.

“I feel like it’s amazing because my hair has grown longer, and now I’m not embarrassed that my hair is short,” she says. “I used to be very embarrassed that it was short and people were looking at me wrong.”
 
Today, volleyball, shopping, food, sleep and the other routines of adolescence have reclaimed much of the space once occupied by cancer.
 
But cancer hasn’t disappeared completely from Penelope’s thoughts.
 
“Now that I’ve gone back to my normal life, I feel that every pain that I have, I feel like it’s going to come back,” she acknowledges. “But I know that I have, hopefully, a strong chance that it won’t come back.”
 
That lingering worry is one reason long-term follow-up remains an important part of pediatric cancer care, Dr. Daghistani says. Survivorship care allows physicians to watch for recurrence as well as possible health effects that can emerge years after treatment.

‘Time Is Precious’

Penelope may say her life today is “basically the same as before,” but at 13, she sees that life through a different lens.
 
“I just enjoy life more because I know that time is precious now that my journey has ended,” she says.
 
Her experience has also changed how she looks at other children facing cancer.

“When I see people, I kind of hurt a little bit because I don’t want them to go through the same thing that I did,” Penelope says. “But if they do, I want them to make it out of it.”
 
It is a perspective shaped by six extraordinary years—and by the people who stayed beside her through them: a mother so close that Penelope calls her “my body part,” and Dr. D and a care team she remembers as a “little ball of sunshine.”
 
Now Penelope wants other children beginning the journey she has finished to know that even when cancer feels overwhelming, there can still be hope on the other side.
 
“If I met someone who has leukemia like me, I would try and comfort them and make sure that not everything is as bad as it seems,” she says. “I hope that they will do the best they can and stay as strong as they can, like I did, to just stay hopeful in their journey.”

 
Click here for more information about the services and specialists available at Baptist Health Herbert Wertheim Cancer Institute.