SPRINGFIELD, Mo. – World, meet Annabelle Meyer.
She’s a vibrant, silly, and very energetic three-year-old.
You wouldn’t know it, but she’s been fighting B Cell Leukemia since May 2022.
“I look at her as a survivor. She doesn’t have it in her blood, but she does have a lot to overcome.” Annabelle’s mother Tiffany Meyer said.
It all started with a nosebleed.
“I started to clean it up and I laid her down and her crib, and then it wouldn’t stop bleeding.” Tiffany Meyer said.
That’s when Annabelle was diagnosed.
“They said that she had one-third of the blood left in her body,” Tiffany said. “The next day it was confirmed that it was leukemia. She had to go up to Saint Louis, and we stayed there for a month.”
Tiffany Meyer says the treatments, which were once every 10 days for 10 months, have become less frequent.
“She’s not considered in remission until she hits ten years,” Meyer said. “She gets chemo every three months, but now it’s through her port, it’s like a five-minute chemo, and then she gets another one in her spine.”
The Meyer family reached out to Make-A-Wish, in an attempt to recoup some of the childhood Annabelle has lost fighting this battle.
“We’re trying to do [in the backyard] and make it over,” David Meyer said. “She is kind of doing parties and stuff like that, and there’s so many new like germs and things, so this little part is going to be able to allow her to be able to be a child again.”
The family met with Make-A-Wish privately tonight to officially submit Annabelle’s wish.
Her father David says the time he spent fighting in Afghanistan helped prepare for this fight.
“I feel like it did help me a lot when she called me in the middle night, to just not lose my emotions,” David said.
The family, deeply rooted in faith, says that helped them get through the roughest times.
“All I could think to tell her was, ‘You know, Jesus gave you a bloody nose too, so we could get you the help that you need because you were sick, and we didn’t know.’ Tiffany Meyer said. “So she walked around the hospital for a month and a half and told everybody that Jesus gave her the bloody nose and saved her life.”
Annabelle is expected to be on a treatment plan until August 2024.
The family says they have to wait up to 14 days to learn if Make-A-Wish will be able to make Annabelle’s wish come true.
