In November of 2023, Jase’s mom, Erin Garland, began to notice bruises on her son. He played sports—soccer, basketball, baseball, and flag football—so getting knocked around wasn’t uncommon. And when she would ask Jase where particular bruises had come from, he’d shrug as is typical for a pre-teen and tell her he didn’t know.
She let it slide at first, presuming, like most, the bruising was the typical by-product of a growing boy playing physical sports. But it kept getting worse, and the discoloring was showing up in places that couldn’t be explained away as just a run-of-the-mill sports injury.
So Jase’s parents took him for blood work. Test results showed he had a low platelet and white blood cell count. A biopsy revealed Myelodysplastic Syndrome, a rare blood condition that is a genetic disorder which first appeared in Jase, and kept progressing as a precursor to leukemia.
“By January of ’24, we knew he needed a bone marrow transplant,” Erin Garland said. “So, found out what the diagnosis was and what we needed to do to keep him alive.”
On May 7, 2024, while most of his friends were finishing up fifth grade, Jase underwent a bone marrow transplant.
“It was a really quick and scary process,” she admitted, but now he’s more than a year post-transplant, “and he is looking good right now, so far.”
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