Mausami Desai remembers the frequent calls from daycare. Her four-year-old son, Ayaan, wasn’t feeling good. His knees and back hurt.
Prescribed medication to treat septic arthritis, it didn’t seem to be helping.
“So, one day I take him to the ER,” she said, recalling a day in January 2021. “And we find out that he has leukemia, and he was straight away admitted to the hospital.”
She and her husband, Pratik, had a thousand questions. What’s the survival rate? What are the treatment paths? Can he recover? Once in remission, can the cancer return?
The rounds of chemotherapy were hard on him. He couldn’t walk for a month. Mausami carried him everywhere. But over time, he got better and grew stronger. Ayaan knew all of his medications by name and exactly when he was to take each pill.
Now, three years later, Ayaan’s cancer is in remission. “He’s been going through a lot of chemo, but I think he’s very strong,” she said. Ayaan is expected to complete treatment this spring.
Mausami said her son, now six, loves spending time with his older brother and enjoys activities like playing in the water, going to arcades, and bowling. He has plans to try baseball.
How did he get into baseball? “I have no idea,” she said. “He never watched any baseball games. And his brother played basketball. But he’s like, ‘No, I want to go out for baseball.’”
Mostly he just likes to hang out with his older brother and doing whatever he’s doing. “Whatever he does,” she said, “he wants to do it, too.”
Mausami said Clement’s Kindness has been a constant in their lives, providing support in the form of financial assistance and arranging events for her family and others with children battling cancer.
“I have attended almost all the events,” she said. “And with him, I didn’t take him to any public events because I was scared that he would get an infection or get sick. So, whenever they do events like this, I always take them and they have fun.”
