“I kept giving her the medicine, but the fevers were not going away,” said Cooley, Peyton’s mother. “I began noticing bruises on her legs and she looked really pale. My mom ‘gut feeling’ told me something was really wrong.”
Peyton’s official diagnosis was delivered at UC Davis Children’s Hospital: Acute lymphoblastic leukemia, a type of cancer in which the bone marrow makes too many lymphocytes (a type of white blood cell).