When Alicia Fivecoat, a mom of two, felt a golf ball-sized mass under her arm late last year, she said she was devastated to learn just weeks later that she had breast cancer. In January, Fivecoat, now 62, was getting bloodwork done at MD Anderson Cancer Center in Houston when she got news that would upend her own battle with cancer. Across the street from MD Anderson, at Texas Children's Hospital, Fivecoat's then-nearly 1-year-old granddaughter Whitney was diagnosed with leukemia.
"It was the most surreal thing," Fivecoat told "Good Morning America," adding that she was with Whitney's paternal grandmother at MD Anderson when they dropped everything to run across the street. "We were literally running from MD Anderson to Texas Children's, trying to just get there." At Texas Children's Hospital, Fivecoat's daughter Shelly McAfee and her husband Tyler McAfee were given the news that their seemingly healthy toddler was battling acute myeloid leukemia, or AML, a cancer of the bone marrow and the blood, according to the National Cancer Institute.
"Our hearts fell to the floor," Shelly McAfee said of hearing the diagnosis. "My husband and I, we just melted." The McAfees said they had noticed some swelling and bruising around Whitney's eye that then spread to her other eye, leading them to seek medical care.
After receiving their daughter's AML diagnosis, the couple's lives were quickly turned upside down. Whitney immediately began chemotherapy, which required the McAfees, also the .