Little heroes: baby sister donates stem cells to sibling battling cancer
Courtesy of Jen Smith
Eliana “Eli” Oviedo-Smith recovers after a bone marrow transplant at UPMC Children’s Hospital of Pittsburgh. Oviedo-Smith was diagnosed with aplastic anemia before she turned 2, and received the life-saving transfusion from her baby sister, Luna, in February 2019.
Courtesy of Jen Smith
Seven-month-old Luna Oviedo-Smith recovers from surgery after donating bone marrow to her older sister, Eli, in 2019. Luna is now a sassy 3-year-old who, her mother Jen Smith says, is going to be the protector of her siblings.
Courtesy of Jen Smith
When Eli Oviedo-Smith, left, was given the all clear by doctors to travel in 2019, she and her family headed to Disney. Eli and younger sister Luna, right, who donated bone marrow to save Eli’s life, enjoyed swimming at their resort Give Kids the World’s pool in Florida.
Courtesy of Jen Smith
Eliana “Eli” Oviedo Smith, left, and her sister Luna, far right, are excited to be older siblings when mom Jen Smith, center, and father Gabriel Oviedo welcome their younger brother in June. Smith said through her medical journey, Eli has remained always resilient and happy.
When doctors at UPMC Children’s Hospital of Pittsburgh gave 6-year-old Eliana “Eli” Oviedo-Smith the all clear, her mother announced, “We’re going to Disney.”
To the Ovideo-Smiths, a trip to Disney World in 2019 through Make-a-Wish Foundation was more than just a family vacation. It was a celebration of sisterhood – Eli’s baby sis, Luna, donated the life-saving bone barrow that made the family trip possible – and a taste of normalcy after six years spent in and out of hospitals.
“That was the first time we could actually do anything,” said Jen Smith, who brought Eli into the world on Aug. 30, 2013. “Home, hospital, that’s it. She didn’t really do much outside that for the first six years of her life.”
Eli was a healthy baby. When she was about a year old, Jen and her partner, Gabriel Oviedo, enrolled their daughter in daycare.
“Everyone says that kids pick up everything at school. She just literally got everything under the sun – a cold, an ear infection,” said Smith. “She ended up getting that hand, foot and mouth. During Christmas, I just started noticing her seem more lethargic. I thought she was under the weather.”
Then, the bruising began.
“Really bad bruising all over her body. I though someone was pushing her at school.”
Smith brought the bruising to the attention of Eli’s daycare teachers, who had suspected something was up at home. Concerned, Smith took her daughter to the doctor, where she learned ear infections may have thrown off Eli’s equilibrium. Bruising, doctors said, could be the result of clumsiness from the ear infections.
Smith and her daughter, not yet 2, returned home and enjoyed the holiday season with family.
“One morning, I woke up and she was just bleeding,” Smith recalled. “Her nose was non-stop bleeding. We took her to the emergency room. Within 12 hours they were like, she’s either got leukemia or aplastic anemia. That’s what started our journey.”
Neither Smith nor Oviedo has a family history of cancer or other like diseases, which made the little girl’s diagnosis of aplastic anemia in January 2015 so shocking.
“I was devastated,” Smith said. “Everything just stopped. Just hearing those words just echo… It was really hard to process.”
Aplastic anemia is, according to Johns Hopkins University, a type of bone marrow failure that causes the marrow to stop producing blood cells.
When Smith and Oviedo received Eli’s pathology report, they learned their daughter had no white cells, a low blood count and no platelets. Eli spent nearly three weeks at Children’s, where doctors worked to bring her counts up to what is called maintenance level.
Treatment for AA is similar to treatments for leukemia and lymphomas. For Eli, the only cure was a bone marrow transplant.
But the family didn’t have a bone marrow match, so Eli tried immunosuppressives and trial drugs.
“We were in clinic about three days a week for four or five years, and then in and out, depending on if she picked up anything or if she had a procedure,” Smith said. “We were in there for three or four days a week just getting blood platelets, transfusions.”
Along with routine blood work – daylong affairs that began with a drive into Pittsburgh from the family’s home in Houston – Eli was twice septic and survived a brain bleed.
“(Doctors) did not want to do any type of procedure because of the level of risk she was at,” Smith explained.
Things began looking up when Smith and Oviedo had their second daughter, Luna, in July 2018.
Luna was her older sister’s perfect match.
The family planned a bone marrow transplant for sometime the following year, when Luna was older. But during a routine biopsy in December 2018, Eli’s doctors announced the procedure would need to be done sooner: Eli had developed Myelodysplastic syndrome, precancerous cells that turn into acute Myeloid leukemia, the poorest prognosis in pediatric care.
On February 11, 2019, both Luna and Eliana were prepped for surgery. Luna was 7 months old when she underwent surgery to donate bone marrow to her elder sister.
“Poor little girl. They took her into surgery and they had to drill two little holes in the back of her hip,” said Smith. “She was a trooper.”
Doctors took additional stem cells from Luna’s umbilical cord, which Smith and Oviedo had saved for Eli’s surgery. While Luna recovered from surgery, Eli underwent her procedure a few floors above her baby sister.
“It was scary,” Smith said. “We had to go between Eli upstairs, getting her chemo, and back down. You want everything to work out smoothly and luckily it did.”
Luna had a tube inserted into her throat, but after a week of rest and iron pills, the 7-month-old was back to normal. Eli, too, made a full recovery.
“Luna’s stem cells worked perfectly for her,” Smith said.
Eli continued commuting between Children’s and home – homebound schooling was provided by Chartiers-Houston teacher Lindsay Hope – and was cleared for travel shortly after surgery. The family traveled to Disney in October 2019; Eli got to sit in the airplane cockpit, and the girls enjoyed swimming, riding rides and visiting SeaWorld.
Two years after surgery, Eli was completely off her medications.
“She is a normal child, playing sports, going to school, complaining about homework,” laughed Smith. “She has so much energy. If you saw her on the street, you’d be like, no, she never went through that.”
Neither Luna – now a sassy 3-year-old – nor laid-back Eli yet fully grasp the gravity of Luna’s stem cell donation. Smith said Eli is just starting to understand that a childhood spent hooked to lines inside a hospital isn’t the norm.
When a family friend had blood drawn recently, Eli noticed the tape on the woman’s arm and asked, “Did you get platelets?”
“She thought that was normal,” Smith said.
Normal is brushing one’s teeth without bleeding, joining friends on the soccer and softball fields, dribbling a ball down the basketball court. Normal is 9-year-old Eli’s life, now.
Smith said for years, she and Oviedo kept Eli in a bubble, worried that a cold would result in a prolonged hospital stay. Now that the world has reopened and Eli is doing great, the family is looking forward to participating in events like Chartiers-Houston’s Relay for Life Saturday.
Eli and Luna have the honor of cutting the ribbon during the opening ceremony.
“She’s excited about that,” said Smith. “They’ll be announcing her story. We’ve never participated because of Eli being sick. Now that she’s better, we’re trying to get out there, spread the word and see how we can help the cause.”