This is the emotional moment a woman who battled cancer at the same time as her mom broke the news to her all-clear mom that she was in remission, too.
Dannielle Draper and her mom Kristin’s cancer journey started in 2021, when an annual physical saw Kristin, 59, bounced between doctors before she was eventually diagnosed with myelofibrosis, a rare blood cancer that causes scarring of the bone marrow.
Over the weeks that followed, Kristin, from Annapolis, Maryland, was set to undergo a stem cell transplant, which would see her unhealthy blood cells with Danielle’s healthy ones.
By this point, Danielle had made peace with her mom’s diagnosis, but when she undertook a series of tests to confirm she could be her mom’s donor, doctors found a tumor the size of a fist in Danielle’s chest while carrying out a routine x-ray.
On December 21, 2021, Danielle, now 29, discovered she had Stage 1 Hodgkin’s lymphoma, and she and her mom faced the prospect of fighting their cancer battles at the same time.
Danielle, from Washington, D.C., started her chemotherapy at the beginning of 2022, while Kristin’s sister became her donor for her stem cell transplant.
Both Danielle and her mom were making progress in the summer of 2022, with Danielle in remission and her mom’s transplant deemed a success.
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But in October 2022, Danielle found out that her cancer fight was not over and the disease had returned.
Doctors informed Danielle the disease was an aggressive form of Hodgkin’s that was resistant to chemotherapy, and now she, too, would have to undergo a stem cell transplant using healthy cells from her younger brother.
That transplant took place on April 4, 2023, leaving Danielle extremely immunocompromised for months to follow.
She was eventually given the news on July 14 that she was again all clear, and she could not wait to break the news to her mom, who was traveling to her apartment in Washington to read the results in person.
Danielle, having seen a positive message from her doctor – “Scan is all clear. Have a nice summer.” – decided to set up her camera and wait for her mom to enter her apartment, as Kristin would not know the results until she entered.
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As soon as Kristin came into the room, an excited Danielle screamed with joy and the pair shared a tearful hug to end their cancer fights.
Danielle said: “As you can see from the video, she barely opened the door before I screamed the good news.
“I was just so excited to tell her.
“This has been such a devastating nightmare for my family and for those who love us, so to tell her that the fight is over felt like winning the lottery of life.
“There really are no words to describe that amount of joy.
“My mom was so surprised —well, more relieved than anything – and we were immediately both crying.”
