The doctors at University of Iowa Children’s Hospital had one option to help save Dillyn Mumme: to run a bone marrow biopsy.

The spongy tissue product in 13-year-old Dillyn’s back was about to be removed with a corkscrew-type instrument. Due to Dillyn’s muscular frame, the anesthetic was not taking to numbing his body. As soon as the tip of the corkscrew scraped the skin on his lower back, he felt everything.

The wrestler began to arch his body from the the medical professional digging into his back, conflicting with the procedure. One doctor quickly pressed their hands down on his back to form a flat surface so the screw could continue drilling into his bone. Dillyn used his arms and legs to free himself from the excruciating pain.

Medical professionals took action, holding down the teenage boy. Seven people, including Dillyn’s father, Corey Mumme, held down the child while the bone marrow was being removed from his back. Dillyn glanced over his shoulder and witnessed his father turn a pale shade of green.

“I don’t know how to explain what it was like to hold down my son,” Corey said.

With a photographic memory, this tops as one of Dillyn’s five worst experiences from when he battled with leukemia.

Leukemia (noun): cancer of the body’s blood-forming tissues, including the bone marrow and the lymphatic system. (Source: Mayo Clinic)

The procedure wasn’t even the worst part of that day.

As a male nurse pushed Dillyn in a wheelchair down the hall, back to the patient’s room, the pair heard a dripping noise. They decided it must be the sink at the wash station they were about to pass. As they strolled past it, the faucet wasn’t leaking. The nurse suddenly said,

“Oh, shit.”

The wheelchair picked up speed and as they made a sharp turn, Dillyn saw a trail of blood down the hallway behind them out of the corner of his eye. As soon as they made it back to the room, the male nurse scooped up Dillyn from the chair and put him on the bed to press against the wound that wasn’t clotting.

“Don’t put on gloves,” someone yelled. “We don’t have time.”

These were the last words Dillyn heard before he passed out, not knowing if he would wake up again.

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“Dillyn was like an adult trapped in a kid’s body,” said Tammy Mumme about her son. While he was active and loved being outdoors, the hairstylist worried about Dillyn being too serious.

“My brother always called Dillyn ‘Mr. Serious’,” Tammy said. “[My brother] said, ‘he’s just so serious, he needs to have fun every now and then, he has plenty of time to be serious when he gets older.’”

It was Homecoming time when Tammy approached eighth-grade Dillyn with a plan. She proposed that she take him and his friends TP-ing, an annual Mount Pleasant ritual.

“Go out and have fun,” she told him. “Even if you get in trouble, we will deal with that, but as long as you have fun.”

That night he hid in a tree and accidentally caught his foot, tearing his tendon. Even so, Tammy was happy her son was able to ease up and enjoy being a child. Only months later, he would have worse news than an injured leg.

It was a Monday in January, wrestling season, when Dillyn came home from a practice and grabbed his chest. Tammy assumed it was the cold weather causing the pain or that he had pulled a muscle. She later took him into a medical clinic, but by Wednesday he was not improving and had gained a cough.

Thursday he was seen by a chiropractor, who said if Dillyn wasn’t healthier by Monday to check in with a doctor.

“One of the first signs of leukemia is the sternum pain and [the chiropractor] missed it,” Tammy said.

That night, Dillyn stepped into the shower and noticed pinpoint, round spots covering his legs. His parents observed it and labeled the spots as broken blood vessels. After getting Dillyn into bed, Tammy scoured the internet to understand what was plaguing her son’s skin.

Friday he was able to get in to see a doctor after school. The doctor was fascinated with the dots, diagnosed as petechiae.

Petechiae (noun): pinpoint, round spots that appear on the skin as a result of bleeding. The bleeding causes the petechiae to appear red, brown or purple. Petechiae (puh-TEE-kee-ee) commonly appear in clusters and may look like a rash. (Source: Mayo Clinic)

The doctor told Tammy and Dillyn he would like to do a blood count for Dillyn in order to understand where the petechiae were coming from.

“I’m going to send you over to the hospital to have your blood checked again, just to make sure ours are accurate,” the doctor said. “In the meantime, I’m going to call Iowa City and see if I can get you in tonight, if not first thing in the morning.”

“I thought to myself at the time, ‘What in the world are you talking about?’” Tammy said.

So, they double-checked the blood count at another hospital.

While in the process of waiting and testing, Tammy saw a nurse she knew.

“I hope it’s not what they think it is,” the nurse said.

“Why is that?” Tammy said. “Is it bad?”

The nurse’s eyes began to tear up and she shook her head yes.

When the doctor met with Tammy and Dillyn again, they began to throw around numbers and terms regarding blood count, but none of it mattered if Tammy didn’t know Dillyn’s blood count.

“You’ve told me what’s high and what’s low, but you haven’t told me Dillyn’s,” Tammy said.

That’s when the word leukemia came from the doctor’s mouth as a possible diagnosis. Dillyn turn to his mother, looked her in the eyes and asked, “What’s leukemia?”

“That was the hardest thing I ever had to do was to tell him they thought he had cancer,” Tammy said. “I didn’t know what we had to do, or how we had to do it, [but] we had to do whatever we had to do to save his life. I can’t put a price on my child’s life.”

Corey was on the road working in construction when he got the call from his wife, explaining their son’s diagnosis.

“Things all changed,” Corey said. “Dillyn was confined to a bubble.”

On Saturday morning, Dillyn woke up to more petechiae reaching up his chest, causing the family to return to the hospital. Within 12 hours, his platelet count dropped from 34,000 to 24,000 — a normal person’s is approximately 150,000 to 300,000. They drove 49.5 miles from Mount Pleasant to Iowa City and by the time they made it, Dillyn was at 19,000 platelets.

Dillyn was at risk of bleeding to death.

This resulted in more tests and observations. By Monday, Dillyn’s platelets were in the triple digits. He received the bone marrow biopsy, but didn’t get the platelet transfusion in time. By this point he was bleeding out on a bed, unconscious. It took three nurses and Tammy’s brother two to three hours to hold tight pressure on his back since the blood wouldn’t clot.

It was only the beginning of treatments, procedures and testing. Meanwhile the family did exactly what they needed to do to keep functioning. Corey would go to work, in Eddyville at the time, to keep their insurance policy intact. He would drive 94 miles to Iowa City after work, spend the night, and drive 94 miles back to work the next day. Jayde, Dillyn’s sister, would stay with family and friends to keep up with her schooling. Tammy wouldn’t leave Dillyn’s side.

One benefit of his journey was that Dillyn and his mother would get close through his treatment, more specifically during his medicine.

There were multiple ways for Dillyn to receive his medicine. The “horse pills,” as Dillyn described them, were bigger than a quarter and had no awful side effects.

The doses of others would be delivered with a 3- to 5-inch needle into his spine. In total, Dillyn received 20 lumbar punctures, or spinal taps, which would occasionally result in migraines if not done correctly.

Lumbar puncture (noun): performed in your lower back, in the lumbar region. During lumbar puncture, a needle is inserted between two lumbar bones (vertebrae) to remove a sample of cerebrospinal fluid — the fluid that surrounds your brain and spinal cord to protect them from injury. (Source: Mayo Clinic)

A majority of his doses came through an IV port. A port is an access tube that is put into a large vein located on the upper arm or chest in order to give doses of chemotherapy.

Chemotherapy (noun): a drug treatment that uses powerful chemicals to kill fast-growing cells in your body. (Source: Mayo Clinic)

Dillyn decided that his mother was the only person who was allowed to give him his chemotherapy on the days he was not at the hospital. At first, Tammy was too nervous to give Dillyn his treatment.

“This is a life or death situation,” the doctor told Tammy. “He has to have it two to three times a day … You’re going to have to mom-up and do it.”

Tammy diligently watched the nurses and tentatively practiced with the professionals in order to feel prepared to do it on her own.

“The first time I did it at home was scarier than all get out,” Tammy said. “But, we did it.”

All the medicine had some type of side effect. Some were easier, with sore muscles and migraines, while others were more consequential, such as the three bones Dillyn broke while on treatment or the chemo brain he suffered through.

Chemo brain (noun): a common term used by cancer survivors to describe thinking and memory problems that can occur after cancer treatment. Signs and symptoms of chemo brain may include the following: Being unusually disorganized, confusion, difficulty concentrating, difficulty finding the right word, feeling of mental fogginess, short attention span, short-term memory problems and more. (Source: Mayo Clinic)

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“[My illness] was such an unusual circumstance for everyone in the high school that they didn’t know how to respond to it,” Dillyn said.

The treatment and side effects followed him into freshman year of high school. A majority of his friends took on competitive sports that Dillyn couldn’t be involved in, which created a divide. His cousin, Rob Pohren, was two grades younger and would spot Dillyn watching him from the bleachers as he wrestled. Pohren realized that he wouldn’t be in the bleachers again to watch Dillyn compete.

Teachers viewed his illness as a crutch. Dillyn missed 300 days of school during his high school career for appointments, treatment and sometimes hospitalization, 78 during freshman year.

The Mumme family would drive 49 miles to Iowa City when necessary for Dillyn. After the time spent in the hospital receiving various treatments, they would drive back to Mt. Pleasant and sometimes Dillyn would be able to go back to classes. However, often times he would be overcome with migraines, ailments and other physical effects that sometimes could not be predicted.

“I think it was a lack of information in my high school. I don’t think they knew how to properly address it, nor did they understand what it meant,” Dillyn said.

Meanwhile, his parents saw the heavy financial burden it was causing them. Before the diagnosis, Tammy was working two full-time jobs cutting hair and managing Lia Sophia home jewelry parties. In order to be there for her son, she had to quit one of her jobs and go part time at the second.

“In that time, I did what I had to do,” Tammy said.

Picking up prescriptions could mean $5,000 worth of medicine for the Mumme family. While Corey was traveling, he noticed all of the parking receipts he was collecting from the parking ramp ranged from $10 to $20 per day.

During one of the first few days of the diagnosis, Tammy walked into the hospital room very quietly, with tears in her eyes after fetching her son’s prescriptions. Dillyn watched as his parents went into the bathroom to speak privately. An organization named Dance Marathon (DM) had paid for all of Dillyn’s prescriptions.

“As small as that seems, that was huge,” Dillyn said. “Just being diagnosed, emergency room visit, hospital stays, medicines, things like that, you have all these numbers going into your head about the financial things. That was one less thing they had to worry about.”

Dance Marathon (noun): a movement benefitting Children’s Miracle Network Hospitals, a non-profit organization that raises funds and awareness for more than 170 pediatric hospitals across North America. They are the only children’s charity committed to having 100 percent of the funds raised stay local to support local kids. (Source: Miracle Network)

While Tammy and Corey admit that DM’s financial help was extremely appreciated, they believe the emotional support was what really helped their family.

“It was great that they helped with copays on doctor and hospital visits, prescriptions and stuff. That was huge,” Tammy said. “But for us, they saved his life. I know they did. They stepped up to the plate and they were there for him. They were there for his sister. They took her under their wing. That was huge for my husband and I.”

Members of DM would not only come to the hospital and spend time with the families and play games with the children, they supported Jayde by attending her dance competitions, went for dinner with the families and became a part of the families’ lives.

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The 13th has always been a lucky day for Dillyn. He met his current girlfriend on June 13, 2017. He got an offer for his dream job on Nov. 13, 2017, to work in the Pathways Program at NASA after completing a summer internship with the space program developing tools for astronauts to use on mobile tablets.

Pathways Program (noun): provides opportunities for students and recent graduates to be considered for Federal employment through NASA Pathways Internship Employment Program, NASA Pathways Recent Graduates Program and NASA Pathways Presidential Management Fellows Program.

May 13, 2012 was Dillyn’s last chemo treatment and Mother’s Day. He celebrated five years cancer free on May 13, 2017.

“There’s excitement and nervousness [when it’s your last treatment],” Dillyn said. “You’re done, but it can come back whenever. It’s like walking down the street or a dark alley. You hear something behind you, so you look over your shoulder.”

His eyes glazed over as he recalled all the moments he had to face death mentally and physically throughout his treatment.

“There were definitely times I didn’t know if I would make it through the night,” Dillyn said. “There were weird circumstances. I mean, if doctors can’t tell you what it is, then …” he trailed off.

Reversing the situation, Dillyn thought of survival, and how guilt can weigh on him when he asks questions such as: Why me? Why did I survive? Why was I chosen?

“It’s almost like your own personal post-traumatic stress disorder in a way,” Dillyn said. “Why didn’t they survive and I did? It’s not the same thing [as the military], but it’s similar. It’s something that’s always on my mind.”

“Kiddos” is the only way Dillyn refers to the children who participate in DM. He has been a member of Iowa State’s DM since freshman year and continues to be involved in the families’ and “kiddos’” lives as much as possible.

He has attended DM events around the Midwest, mainly at Iowa State and the University of Iowa. But, during the candle ceremony at Iowa State’s DM and the Dancing in Our Hearts video at University of Iowa, he is reminded that he was not alone in the struggles he endured.

“You start to cycle through why I survived and then I survived so then I need to do this, I need all my dreams to pursue these things,” Dillyn said. “DM is almost a rejuvenation every year, making sure I’m striving to achieve those goals.”

As Dillyn zipped up his NASA slick jacket, he paused and stated, “Anything worth having in life is worth working for.”