The bond grandparents share with their grandchildren is indescribable. It’s often a deep, almost otherworldly connection that can be beautiful to witness in action. It often manifests in grandparents being far more permissive and laid-back with their grandchildren than they ever were with their own children. The bond can look like more openness, vulnerability, and even playfulness on the part of the older relatives.
For one grandmother and granddaughter, it showed up especially so when the two of them found themselves fighting two different forms of cancer at the same time.
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Last year, Alicia Fivecoat, a 62-year-old mother of two, felt a golfball-sized lump under her arm. Later, she learned that she has breast cancer. The day she got the news, her nearly 1-year-old granddaughter Whitney was across the street at Texas Children’s Hospital in Houston being diagnosed with leukemia.
“It was the most surreal thing,” Fivecoat told Good Morning America. At the time of her diagnosis, Fivecoat just so happened to be with Whitney’s other grandmother on her dad’s side. When they heard the news, the two dropped everything. “We were literally running from MD Anderson to Texas Children’s, trying to just get there,” Fivecoat recalled.
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Fivecoat’s daughter and Whitney’s mother Shelly McAfee, and her husband Tyler, had noticed bruising around Whitney’s eye. Eventually, it spread to the other eye, causing the couple to seek medical attention.
That’s when they learned that their daughter had acute myeloid leukemia, a cancer of the bone marrow and blood. “Our hearts fell to the floor,” Shelly McAfee said of their reaction to the diagnosis. “My husband and I, we just melted.”
Whitney immediately began chemotherapy at the hospital. The facility is a two-hour drive from the McAfee’s home in Port Lavaca, Texas, where they also raise their 4-year-old son. The two relocated there for 40 days. Around the same time, Fivecoat started her own chemotherapy with MD Anderson across the street.
“My mom’s chemo schedule fell on a Friday, so there were times where my mother-in-law would bring her to treatment, and they would actually stay with Whitney, and both my husband and I would be at home with our son,” Shelly McAfee explained. “It was a good time for her to be there, to hang out with Whitney, but also a time to rest, and in the event that she didn’t feel great or needed to go back to MD Anderson, she was right there.”
For the next several months, both granddaughter and grandmother went through the side effects of chemo together, like losing their hair. As they were fighting similar battles, Fivecoat said Whitney was her inspiration.
“When you know that your granddaughter, who at that point wasn’t even a year old, has already done that treatment, it made me realize, ‘You know what, I can do this,'” Fivecoat said. “There were several different instances where I was scared about what I had coming up, and Shelly would go, ‘Mom, Whitney’s already done that.’ So I’m like, ‘Well, OK, I can do this too, you know.'”
Then, in June 2024, Whitney received a bone marrow transplant from an anonymous donor. Two months later, Fivecoat underwent a double mastectomy.
“I’m not really sure how we would have all gotten through the last six months without each other,” Fivecoat said. Family members who supported her included her son-in-law’s family and her younger daughter.
Whitney’s oncologist, Dr. Erin Doherty, said the toddler benefitted from the familial support as well. “Whitney would just light up whenever she saw grandma and grandpa, and all her family members who visited her, so it definitely helped her kind of forget about what was going on while she was in the hospital.”
Now, almost a year later, both Whitney and Fivecoat are still on their joint healing journeys. Fivecoat has eight more chemotherapy treatments and a reconstructive breast surgery scheduled. Meanwhile, Whitney has responded well to her transplant. She should live a “long, healthy life” according to Dr. Doherty.
The McAfees are clear that they were bolstered by the support of their entire village. “Naturally, we want to take care of things ourselves and not depend on other people, but having to go through this and having to depend on other people, it’s just very, it’s very humbling,” Tyler McAfee said. “But it also gives you a whole new level of appreciation and love for other people.”
