A 22-year-old woman was vacationing in Mexico at the end of 2021 when she noticed red splotches on her wrist. She chalked them up to something she ate. “I thought maybe I just ate something that was no good for my body,” Johanna Mendoza, now 25, told TODAY.com. But when the splotches started traveling to other parts of her body, she became concerned.
Upon returning home from her vacation, she made a trip to the emergency room. There, she was diagnosed with acute lymphocytic leukemia, a type of cancer, and told she'd need a blood stem cell transplant in order to treat it.
“I was definitely surprised,” she said. “[It] was definitely scary.” She thought the splotches were maybe being caused by an allergic reaction initially. “It was a weird thing," she said.
Once doctors got the test results back, Johanna had to stay inside her hospital room because her immune system had been compromised. “It was definitely very hard on me,” she said. They ended up being able to find a donor for a bone marrow transplant fairly quickly. “I thought it was going to be a longer process," the 25-year-old recalled.
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Johanna had a bone marrow biopsy 100 days after her transplant, and thankfully is now cancer free. “Life throws you a curveball, but just because it throws it at you doesn’t mean you have to give up,” she said. "Keep going and keep crushing it."
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