Mom becomes pediatric nurse at Wolfson Children’s Hospital after daughter battles rare cancer

JACKSONVILLE, Fla. — Elizabeth Ruzanka was showing off her school project.

“I put in the windows and then made the doors and made that sun right there,” Elizabeth said.

It’s a replica of Wolfson Children’s Hospital, where her mother now works as pediatric nurse and where her life was saved seven years ago.

“She was diagnosed with infant acute lymphoblastic leukemia the day she turned 8 weeks old," Kristi Ruzanka, the assistant nurse manager of Wolfson Children’s Hospital said.

Her daughter had a fever and her skin had turned gray.

After getting lab work done, doctors told her that her daughter’s form of leukemia was not only rare, it was life-threatening.

“We had her baptized in the ICU. My biggest concern was that I didn’t want to leave her side, because I didn’t know how much time I would have with her,” Ruzanka said.

Ruzanka said her daughter spent the first year and a half of her life at Wolfson Children’s Hospital.

Leukemia is the most common form of cancer in children and teens. The American Cancer Society says this year alone there will be 60,000 new cases. Of those cases, 160 of them will be infants.

“80 percent of them have a genetic rearrangement that makes it a very difficult cancer to treat. She’s in the 20 percent that doesn’t have it, so she’s a walking rarity in many ways,” she said.

Elizabeth was in remission 6 weeks after being diagnosed with cancer and her mother said it was the treatment that kept her that way.

She was treated with chemotherapy for the next two years.

It wasn’t until she was 16 months old that she was finally able to go home.

Now, Elizabeth is in second grade at Assumption Catholic School and is thriving.

Still, this family said they aren’t in the clear yet.

“We hit the 5 year off-treatment mark in February and now she can be considered to be in survivorship clinic," Ruzanka said. “I still have a really hard time saying the word ‘cured,’ because I’m always afraid of what’s going to happen.”

Elizabeth undergoes routine lab work each year and gets her heart checked because the chemotherapy can have harmful effects on her body. Her mother said it can even cause secondary cancers to emerge.

After witnessing what her daughter went through, Kristi accepted job at Wolfsons Children’s Hospital, where she’s worked over the last three years.

It’s a move she made to help children like her daughter get healthy.

Having a child in the hospital is stressful and this hospital mom said after experiencing it, she’s able to relate to what other parents go through.

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