Written by Ben Cox – When a simple trip to the pediatricians office reveals something more serious than a simple infection or 24-hour bug, what do you do?

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September is National Childhood Cancer Awareness Month, and Brownwood has many families who have been touched by this terrible disease. Some have tales of triumph and overcoming the diagnosis, while others stories of those of remembrance and mourning.

Carlee Richardson is by all appearances a normal teenager, in her 2nd year of high school. Active in Drill Team, Theatre and other activities, you’d be forgiven for being surprised that at one point she had a tumor the size of her fathers fist in her neck.

At a birthday party the girls got their hair done and played princess and dress up for the afternoon. When a cousin noticed a lump on the back of seven year-old Carlee’s neck, her parents had no idea it was even there let alone that it could be threatening her life.

Sandra Richardson, Carlee’s mother said “None of us had noticed it, and I washed her hair every night in the bathtub. We looked, there was no pain, it was really soft, we thought maybe she had an infection or something. We thought it was a lymph node.”

Richardson says the most common place of symptoms are often overlooked, as were her daughters. “She had no symptoms, until I looked back. Hindsight is 20/20. Different things she was having could be explained away. Like she was cranky because she was having a growth spurt, or staying up too late playing. I just didn’t put it together, because you never imagine it’s gonna be cancer.”

A small child for her age, the tumor played a large role in that. “She really was tiny for her age. I just thought she was petite. After we found everything out it turned out her body was focused on fighting that cancer so she wasn’t growing. As a matter of fact, when we went in for her six week check up after her surgery she had grown four inches!”

A tumor was discovered in her neck by doctors at Dell Children’s Hospital after her parents went in search of a second opinion. “The doctors did blood tests, searching for everything. Cat Scratch fever, a mosquito bite that was too swollen. They even thought it was a frozen lymph node. The problem was her cancer was underneath the muscle and reacting to the cancer.”

Michael Richardson, Carlee’s father, offers a bit of advice to parents looking for what is wrong when the doctors can’t figure it out. “Get to a children’s specialty hospital. They see this sort of thing all the time.”

After being told it would be a few days until they heard the results of the CT scan, the family was at lunch before returning to Brownwood when Sandra’s phone rang. “The doctor said it’s not an infection, I have scheduled an appointment with the pediatric surgeon, come on back.”

The surgery performed days later, the doctor came to the family with grim news. Michael says “He said it was a tumor, about the size of my fist, and while they were going to have it biopsied, they knew from experience it was cancer.”

At that moment, Michael says he turned to his wife and said” I can’t tell you how I know, but I know it’s everything’s gonna be ok. I was worried but I had a calmness that everything was just gonna be ok.”

And it was. The surgery was successful, the entire tumor was removed and no radiation or chemotherapy was going to be necessary. It was a fully encapsulated Inflammatory Myofibroblastic Tumor, a soft tissue sarcoma often found in childhood cancer patients.

The surgery took place the summer between her 1st and 2nd grade years at Woodland Heights, and Carlee was bound and determined to attend the first day of her second grade year. There were requirements, though, that took some work to achieve. However, Carlee was relentless in achieving the range of motion and other stipulations the doctors put in front of her before they would allow her to return to school.

Eight years later, and she is still the determined girl that won’t let things get in her way. The surgeon, when closing the incision, took great care to make sure “she could wear her hair up for prom” and while she hasn’t decided on the dress yet for next spring, her hair will most definitely be up.

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