In the spring of 2003, I had lost my very first friend. I don't mean moving away lost. I'm talking about no matter what I do I won't see her again.
Her name was Katja. I met her at 'The Tree of Hope' at the Centra Care Center in St.Cloud. The Tree of Hope is an even for children with cancer, the familes with survivors and the familes who didn't get so lucky, like Katja's.
Katja had Acute Myelogenous Leukemia otherwise known as AML which is a type of childhood cancer. When she was a year and a half she started to get extremely horrible nose bleeds that lasted for hours on end. Katja also had very bad bruising. Katja was an only child and one night her dad woke up in the middle of the night to check on her, to find his only child laying in a pool of blood. That was how the doctors discovered she had AML. She was sent the next day to Childrens Hospital and Clinics in Minneapolis. Katja was on chemo therapy for 3 years, girls usually only have treatment for 2 years and boys for 3. She was having some difficulties with the medicines so her doctor recommend a bone marrow transplant. It is very hard to find the perfect donor which is a 6 out of 6 for a bone marrow transplant. Katja found a donor matching with a 5 out of 6, that was all they could find and she was desperate for it. That still wasn't enough, she was going to need a second transplant. Her soon to be brother would be her donor, however her baby brother came too late. Katja had died at the age of 5.
My family and I received a letter a few days letter to attend Katja's wake and funeral. Most children when they are young don't understand what the wake and funeral mean besides a large crowd of people gathered around a closed casket, balling their eyes out and usually wearing black. I understood everything that was happening I was honestly really scared. It was one of the hardest things I think that a 7 year old could experience, to see a little girl in her blue Cinderella dress that she loved for the last time...ever. I still wonder to this day what her life would be like now if she was still here.
