According to PEOPLE, Nicole Dodge noticed her daughter was having strange movement in her arm when she was 15 months year old. During the exclusive interview, she said in early 2022 she saw how her daughter, Natalie was only moving the bottom half of her arm. “I thought I was crazy,” she explained to PEOPLE.
“We all came to this conclusion that maybe it was a partial dislocation and maybe it would work itself out if we gave it through the weekend,” she recalls. “It was a Friday afternoon, it was the beginning of 2022, so there were still heightened COVID protocols in hospitals. My only option at that point was to go to the ER. She wasn’t even crying so that seemed really extreme.”Â
She continued to explain that by Monday she took her other four kids to her mother-in-law’s house and took Natalie straight to the pediatric ER and that’s when she found out the devastating news. “They told me that they didn’t like the way the bone looked [in the x-ray], that it looked really brittle and that could have been caused by anything from nutrient deficiencies like minerals and vitamins to cancer. They said the word cancer, but it was said just in such a passing way that I didn’t think that [could be the reason], I thought it was more like they’re just telling me every possibility,” she recalls.
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“We have a really long list of potential things that could be wrong with your daughter, and we have to go through the list one by one and kind of move things out. And I need you to understand that the top two things on this list are both cancers,” the doctors told Dodge. “I was like, ‘What?’ I felt like the rug was ripped out from underneath me.”
“They explained to me that they could basically confirm or rule out both of those items with a urine sample and a blood test that they were going to do first thing in the morning. The urine test confirmed Natalie had increased levels of Catecholamines and decided it was prudent to do an MRI that afternoon.”
“Eventually we had a biopsy and a CT scan. We had a general idea within the first 24 hours that we were in the hospital that it was likely cancer. We had a pretty good idea about four days in that it was neuroblastoma, but we didn’t know how bad it was at that point.”
Four days later, the Dodges got the call that Natalie’s results were in. “It was high risk or stage 4 neuroblastoma. It’s MYCN amplified, which means that her type of cancer grows at 10 times the rate of regular neuroblastoma.”