4-year-old Caymanian boy battles rare blood cancer

At just 4 years old, Kody Ebanks is battling a rare type of blood cancer while his family prays for a Christmas miracle as his medical bills mount.

The Ebanks family has launched a GoFundMe page for the Red Bay Primary School student in the hopes of offsetting the medical bills for his life-saving treatment for acute lymphoblastic leukaemia (ALL) at Nicklaus Children’s hospital in Miami.

“It is not a one-time treatment. It’s not a one doctor bill. It potentially could be a two-year process,” Kody’s father Kervin Ebanks told the Cayman Compass via a telephone interview from Miami.

“So we are preparing any type of resource that we can get, if anybody wants to give anything they can, because it’s so hard for us to foresee next year, much less the next two years of what’s going to be happening.”

As at 18 Dec., US$8,920 in donations had been raised out of an initial target of $50,000.

Little Kody is currently undergoing chemotherapy and his father says it has been difficult seeing his son, a happy, energetic child, have to fight for his life.

“At the moment, he is fully functional, up and running around. He’s not on any IV line or anything like that right now, he’s just on medication. The medication is more mentally taxing than physically,” Ebanks said.

In addition to chemo, Kody is also on medication to combat the impact that the treatment will have on his young body.

Periods of illness

The Red Bay student was only recently diagnosed. The UK National Health Services says “Acute lymphoblastic leukaemia (ALL) is a rare type of cancer that affects the blood and bone marrow” and “it is not always clear what causes it”.

Kervin Ebanks said everything happened so fast after his diagnosis in terms of treatment, but getting to the point of knowing what was making his son sick did not happen as quickly.

He said when Kody started school in September, he began having periodic bouts of illness.

“He got sick one week, and then he’d be well the next five days or so, and then the next week he’d get sick again. It was just fevers, coughs and congestion in the throat, in the chest. We were wondering what it was all about,” he said.

At first, Ebanks said he and his wife Desire initially thought Kody was getting sick because he was mixing with more children or due to the aftereffects of the antibiotics he had to take every time he got ill.

However, Ebanks said the periods of illness started lasting longer and longer, and one night Kody ran a fever that lasted 24 hours.

He said Kody’s paediatrician Dr. Gordon Smith, upon seeing the child’s condition, sent them straight to urgent care where they ran a range of tests, including blood tests.

He said the haematologist, after reviewing the tests, told them that they found cells that were the first signs of cancer in leukaemia patients.

Ebanks said though the news was a blow, he was mentally preparing because he lost an older sister to leukaemia before he was born.

He said one day, prior to Kody being taken to hospital, Ebanks’ mother looked at him and said she did not want to scare him, but she thought Kody had leukaemia.

He said she told him that Kody “looks kind of pale, and this was weeks before he was even sick with a cold. He was healthy and running around and happy and this is when she she noticed it from until like the end of October, beginning of November,” he said.

Continuing to fight

He said when he got the confirmation, he was “somewhat prepared”.

“All I did was begin to process and, of course, I was flooded with emotions, but I seemed somehow prepared for this. I just boxed up whatever needed to be boxed up emotionally, and I put it to the side. Then I started to act and go forward with each step that I need to … save my son’s life,” Ebanks said.

He said the family will be spending the holidays in Miami, between treatments at the hospital and where they are staying.

He said they expected to return to Cayman in January. 

Ebanks said he was grateful to everyone who has supported the GoFundMe page as well as the staff and parents at Red Bay Primary and his relatives.

He also urged parents to do regular blood testing for their kids because he believes if more tests were done in Kody’s early years the cancer could have been caught sooner.

“No blood tests were ever done, which makes me wonder if this could have been caught earlier if the clinics did regular blood test for kids within their first four years. I think the public should be aware that your child may look strong on the outside and growing well, but the immune system is invisible and blood should be checked early rather than later,” he said.