Meet Camryn (“Cam”) and Brinley (“Brin”), your August Butterfly Buddies!
Cam and Brin are sisters who both recently celebrated birthdays in May - Cam turned 7 and Brin turned 10 years old. On most days they would tell you that they’re each other's best friends. They live in Connecticut with their mom, Courtney, who is a 5th grade math teacher in their town, and their dad, Don, a contractor, and the self-appointed “softy” of the two parents. Brin is an amazing big sister, a caring friend, and loves to be on-the-go at all times. She’s academically gifted, and school is her happy place. Cam also enjoys school, but less for the learning and more the socializing, as the sassy “it girl” amongst her friends. She’s very artistic and loves to draw - her sketchpad is her happy place. And, as Courtney and Don have learned, both of their girls are super resilient.
In April 2023, after experiencing some flu-like symptoms, Cam fell asleep on a playdate– very unusual behavior for the active 5-year-old. Courtney also noticed that Cam’s complexion looked a bit yellow, so she got her into an appointment with their pediatrician. The next morning, Courtney received a call from the doctor: Cam’s blood work had come back abnormal, and she had to get Cam to the hospital for a blood transfusion right away. Within the first 24 hours in the hospital, Cam received five units of blood and the medical team ran tests on multiple blood samples, but everything was coming back negative as they searched for a diagnosis. Courtney and Cam would spend the next eight days - the longest time they had ever spent away from Brin and Don - in the hospital while the doctors worked to find a diagnosis. On the eighth day, a bone marrow biopsy would confirm the family’s worst fear: Camryn had leukemia.
After diagnosis on April 28, 2023, Courtney took a leave of absence from her job to be Cam’s full-time caregiver. She and Cam were together nonstop for the first four months of treatment, until they could both go back to school intermittently that following September.
“It’s a long road. It’s very busy at the beginning and less busy as you go along, but it has a lot of bumps in between that you don’t plan for - unscheduled visits and appointments and trips to the ER,” explains Courtney, adding, “all of those things I was lucky enough not to worry about with healthy kids - such as where’s the nearest hospital to you everywhere you go - had to become a new part of our lives.”
Cam will be on chemotherapy until July of 2025; she is responding well to treatment, but is still facing side effects, like an increased appetite, joint pain, and mood swings that are unavoidable with the steroid treatments she is also undergoing. Courtney recalls finding a piece of paper on which Cam had written, “My meds are making me mad.”
Brin hasn’t come out of the experience unscathed either. She’s had to miss out on group activities and birthday parties to make sure that she doesn’t bring germs home to her sister, and on some days she finds it hard to contend with all the extra attention that Cam is receiving. “It has definitely tested our parenting skills, having one child who is sick and needs our attention often, and having one child who still needs our attention, but for different reasons,” Courtney tells us.
Courtney and Don have found ways to give both girls the time and space to express their feelings, embracing all the support around them - from traditional counseling and time with their grammy, to animal and art therapy - to ensure that the girls always have someone to talk to, even if it’s not Courtney and Don.
“I’ve always been a firm believer that everyone can benefit from therapy; it’s just about finding the right match, whatever that type of therapy looks like for each individual,” Courtney explained, adding, “this is why we were so excited to find Lucy’s Love Bus. It allowed both of my girls to find the individual outlets they needed during this time.”
Thanks to donors like you, Lucy’s Love Bus is able to fund gymnastics for Brinley and private art classes for Camryn. For Brin, gymnastics provides her with a sense of accomplishment that group sports just weren’t able to give her. As an individualized activity, where your progress is based on your own hard work and effort, she has the opportunity to shine on her own merits, giving Brin an unparalleled sense of confidence. After diagnosis, Cam was thrilled to be able to stay in the familiar art center that she had been going to before she was sick, with private art lessons so that she wouldn’t be unnecessarily exposed to germs during her most immunocompromised times. Cam uses her art as an outlet to express the things that she can’t or won’t talk about otherwise.
“Our dog, Brooklyn, passed away last July, and since Cam was home with him everyday, they had formed an even closer bond than most children have with their family dog. To this day, she makes art with his name on it or makes art pieces of a dog. She hasn’t talked to me, Don, or her therapist about his passing, but it comes out in her art. We’re so thankful she has this outlet,” Courtney tells us.
