While on summer vacation 2023, Landon Motter, then 11, stepped out of the go-kart and felt an aching in his left hip. “He’s like, ‘It hurts a little bit,’” Landon’s dad, Blake Motter, 33, of Gaithersburg, Maryland, tells TODAY.com.
“I was like, ‘You’re growing. ..
. Those carts are a little small. Give it some time.
’” But Landon’s hip pain continued through the start of school. Soon, he was waking up and crying in the middle of the night. After numerous doctors’ appointments, the family learned why: Landon had Stage 4 non-Hodgkin lymphoma.
“I was completely devastated,” mom Courtney Anderson, 32, of Clarksburg, Maryland, tells TODAY.com. “Hearing the word cancer, your mind just completely goes blank.
I’m like, ‘Oh my gosh, what is his life going to look like after this? Is he going to survive?’” When the 2023-2024 school year began, Landon started soccer practice again, and the pain he first experienced over the summer returned in a serious way. Soon, he was limping. “There was one game that we definitely both noticed that he was favoring one side,” Anderson says.
“We’re like, this is weird — the fact that this has been a couple months now and he still seems to be very much in pain.” At night, he’d wake crying because the aching hurt so intensely. “We were giving him Motrin basically around the clock.
As soon as it would wear off, he would be crying,” Anderson says. “Once he started waking up in the middle of the nigh.