BAKER CITY — The Loza family’s dearest Christmas wish, that 14-year-old Ricardo “Ricky” Loza would have a second bone marrow transplant to restore his leukemia-ravaged immune system, was not granted.

Instead they spent the holiday, indeed much of the winter, hoping that Ricky would again go into remission.

It was a grim season, said Ricky’s mother, Gissel Loza.

Ricky was sick much of the time.

His doctors were worried, Gissel said.

His survival was far from certain.

“They were not giving us false hope,” she said.

The situation was horribly familiar for the Lozas, who moved to Baker County in 2019 from Bakersfield, California.

Gissel, 37, and her husband Geovanny, 39, who live between Baker City and Haines, have four sons and one daughter.

In June 2023 their second-oldest son, Leonardo, died at age 16 after suffering a series of strokes over the previous two years, caused by a brain disorder.

At the same time, Ricky was being treated for acute myeloid leukemia, a fast-spreading form of that cancer.

He was diagnosed in the spring of 2022, several months after Leonardo’s first stroke.

In July 2022, Ricky had a bone marrow transplant. The donor was his younger brother, Bernardo, then 11.

Ricky’s condition improved after the marrow transplant.

He no longer suffered from the dizzy spells, fatigue and severe bruising, even from minor bumps, that had afflicted him for months.

Doctors said the cancer was in remission.

In September 2023, Ricky started his freshman year at Baker High School.

“He was excited about that,” Gissel said.

That same month, during a routine visit to St. Luke’s Hospital in Boise for a checkup, doctors told Gissel that Ricky’s blood tests were normal.

But just a month later, during another doctor visit, a blood test detected cancer cells.

A biopsy of Ricky’s bone marrow confirmed that the cancer had returned.

Gissel said doctors told her it was rare for leukemia to recur relatively soon after a bone marrow transplant.

Waiting. … again

Doctors told the Lozas that Ricky would need another transplant.

But first they had to treat the leukemia.

Again.

The initial treatments failed, which is why Ricky didn’t have the transplant before Christmas.

But Gissel said doctors decided to try different treatments, ones typically reserved for adults.

This regimen, which included chemotherapy and radiation, worked.

But it was a hard winter for Ricky and his family.

“He was very weak, and his legs were swollen,” Gissel said. “It was really hard on him.”

But by the start of March, Ricky was healthy enough for another transplant.

He underwent the procedure on March 13 at Doernbecher Children’s Hospital at the Oregon Health and Science University in Portland.

This time, though, the transplant wasn’t bone marrow.

Instead, Ricky received blood from an umbilical cord or placenta collected after the birth of a baby and added to a cord blood bank.

This blood, like bone marrow, contains stem cells that can replace cells destroyed by a disease, including leukemia, and its treatment.

The transplant helps to, in effect, rebuild the patient’s immune system.

Gissel said the combined ravages of cancer and the treatments basically “reset” Ricky’s immune system.

Once he is healthy, he will be given the same vaccinations, for diseases such as measles and whooping cough, that he received as a baby.

(Ricky was supposed to have inoculations during the doctor visit in October 2023 when doctors detected that leukemia had returned.)

Gissel said Ricky’s doctors told her that the cord blood transplant would not yield benefits as quickly as the bone marrow transplant did in 2022.

That was true, she said.

But Ricky’s condition has improved since the March 13 transplant.

And Gissel said doctors are optimistic that the second transplant will have longer-lasting benefits.

A normal childhood turns tragic

Prior to 2021, the Loza children were healthy in general, dealing only with the usual colds and similar minor maladies so common to childhood.

The one exception was Leonardo, who was diagnosed as a baby with hydrocephalus, an accumulation of fluid in the brain.

When Leonardo was 10, doctors diagnosed arteriovenous malformation, a condition that affects arteries and veins, typically in the brain or spinal cord, that can lead to bleeding in those areas.

Gissel said doctors treated the condition and believed they had it controlled.

But starting in March 2021, Leonardo struggled to keep his balance.

Doctors confirmed his parents’ fear, that he had suffered a stroke.

Leonardo was confined to the University of California-San Francisco’s Benioff Children’s Hospital for extended periods over the next several months.

In the fall of 2021, Gissel, who traveled with Leonardo to and from the California hospital multiple times, noticed that Ricky seemed “depressed.”

She attributed this to Ricky’s concern about his older brother.

“We’ve always been a united family, and I thought he was sad about his brother,” Gissel said of Ricky in November 2023. “The stress of his brother being in the hospital all the time.”

But as the months passed, Gissel became more concerned about Ricky.

One day he took a minor fall, slipping in fresh snow. Although the impact was not dramatic, and the snow should have served as a cushion, Ricky’s hand was severely bruised.

Doctors soon after diagnosed leukemia.

A family separated by medical maladies

Gissel has been staying in the Ronald McDonald House just a half mile or so from Doernbecher’s, where Ricky has checkups on Mondays and Wednesdays.

His younger siblings continue to attend school in Baker City. Bernardo is a seventh grader at Baker Middle School, and the youngest Loza, Victoria, is a second grader at Brooklyn Primary.

The eldest, named Geovanny after his father, graduated from Baker High School in June 2023 and is attending barber college in California.

Gissel said she and her husband, who works for Allen Farms, are grateful to the many local residents who have offered to assist the family, including putting on a spaghetti feed with proceeds going to the Lozas.

“It’s been very helpful,” she said.

Ricky will have to stay at the hospital for at least 100 days after the stem cell transplant — until late June.

If he continues to improve, he should be able to return home, Gissel said.

Ricky will celebrate his 15th birthday on May 12

Gissel said doctors told her that once Ricky is home, he will need to visit a doctor every two weeks. But those checkups could be done in Boise, saving about six hours of driving compared with traveling to Portland.

That would be a blessing, Gissel said.

She’s amassed many thousands of miles on the highways over the past three years due to her sons’ illnesses.

“I’ve been on the move so much,” she said.

The goal now, she said, is for Ricky to start his sophomore year at BHS with his classmates in late August.

“He really wants to go back to school, socializing with his friends,” Gissel said.

She said he tries to keep in touch through a phone, but it’s a poor substitute for actually spending time with his friends.