Woman, 22, who thought of red spots on her hand while on holiday in Mexico is diagnosed with rare CANCER

A 22-year-old woman’s holiday in Mexico turned into a fight for survival after she noticed red spots had appeared on her wrists.

Johanna Mendoza wasn’t concerned when she first saw the spots on her body, thinking it was caused by an allergic reaction to something she ate.

But when it spread to the rest of her body, she was rushed to hospital, where 24 hours later she was diagnosed with a rare form of cancer called acute lymphocytic leukemia (ALL).

ALL is a progressive cancer of the blood and bone marrow and accounts for less than one in 200 of all cancers diagnosed in the US

ALL affects less than 0.5 percent of all people with cancer in the US

The majority of ALL cases occur in children, but most deaths (about four in five) occur in adults.

Symptoms of ALL may include feeling tired, weak, dizzy, dizzy, bruising or red spots, and recurring infections.

When Mendoza found out she had ALL, her overnight stay in the hospital turned into a two-month stay as doctors tried to get her platelet count up to normal through numerous blood transfusions.

The spots appeared on Mendoza’s body because the leukemia caused blood vessels to break and bleed under the skin.

The platelets are blood cells that develop in the bone marrow to form clots to stop or prevent bleeding, and without them the blood vessels cannot heal.

When Mendoza’s platelet count was high enough, she was sent home and told to undergo chemotherapy and a bone marrow transplant.

For two months, Mendoza underwent 24-hour chemotherapy and was placed on a bone marrow transplant list after her twin sister and brother were both not considered a viable match. agreement.

“We actually found one very quickly, which was shocking,” Mendoza told NBC5, adding, “I thought it was going to be a longer process.”

Johanna Mendoza was able to go home on Christmas Eve and at the age of 25 she is now cancer-free

A bone marrow transplant, also called a stem cell transplant, is an important addition to chemotherapy because aggressive chemotherapy can seriously damage the bone marrow, which is needed to produce new, healthy blood cells, according to the study. American Cancer Society.

However, finding a donor can be a difficult and lengthy process, with only 30 percent of patients having a family member who can be a donor, while some people have to wait years to find a match.

The person’s ethnic background plays a role in how quickly a match is made, ranging from black people who have only a 29 percent chance of finding a match to white people who have an 80 percent chance.

Meanwhile, Asian or Latin American people, like Mendoza, fall in the middle with a just under 50 percent chance of finding a match on a donor list.

“There is a big gap in the likelihood that we will find what we would historically have considered a perfectly matched donor,” Dr. Steven Devine, the Chief Medical Officer of the National Marrow Donor Program. Today.com.

There is now the opportunity to get a donor who is an almost exact match, bridging the gap for people who cannot access a perfect-match transplant.

If a bone marrow transplant is not a perfect match, the patient may develop graft-versus-host disease (GVHD), which is caused by the immune system attacking the donated stem cells.

Mendoza’s donor had to match her human leukocyte antigen – a protein found on most cells in the body – by exactly half.

After the transplant, Mendoza became part of the clinical trial for a post-transplant drug cyclophosphamide.

Doctors are investigating whether taking the drug in the third and fourth days after receiving a transplant will prevent GVHD by blocking the immune system from reacting to the donor’s T cells and thereby rejecting the transplant.

After the procedure, Mendoza had to remain in isolation for two to three weeks to prevent infection, but on Christmas Eve she received the news that she could go home.

Mendoza underwent a biopsy 100 days after her transplant and is now 25 years old and cancer-free.

“Life throws you a curveball, but just because it throws it at you doesn’t mean you have to give up,” Mendoza told TODAY.

“Go ahead and keep crushing it.”