COMM U N I T Y
BY:CALLIE COLLINS
Photo by: Emily Kuehn-Studio 802 Photography
#B akerTough
Norman family raises awareness about rare cancer, shares infant son’s journey
M
organ and Chance Grubb sound like typical parents of small children as they talk about milestones like starting school, sleeping through the night and learning to crawl. Their sons, Cooper, 5, and Baker, who will be 1 in July, keep them busy. Like so many families at this life stage, the days are long but the years are short, occupied with the constancy of care all children require. Despite the familiar details of the Grubb family, an extremely rare diagnosis is now also part of their daily life. Baker, 10 months, is the world’s youngest Langerhans Cell Histiocytosis patient. A rare form of cancer, the disease causes lesions throughout the body. The only newborn with the condition specific to the lungs, Baker was diagnosed at just under a month old, despite an otherwise uneventful pregnancy. Connections to the University of Oklahoma, a lifelong tie for the couple, the
16 | June 2020
OU football season ticket holders found support in the Norman community. “Baker was a Big 12 Title baby. The Tuesday before he was born, we started talking about naming him Baker,” Chance said, a reference to quarterback Baker Mayfield. “Now, it seems very fitting for the tenacious, tough little fighter we didn’t know that he would have to be.” Morgan, a nurse, was in a minor traffic accident on the way to work at OU Medical Center while 35 weeks pregnant. Her mother-in-law, who also works at the hospital as a perinatal clinical nurse specialist, insisted she get checked out. She turned out to be in labor and proceeded to have a c-section. “It was a pretty crazy two-hour span. We went from the work week about to end, being a regular Friday, to having a car accident that was more of an annoyance than any real risk, to having a baby who then went into the NICU,”
Morgan shared. Baker had trouble breathing from the very beginning. “We were waiting there in the operating room for our newborn son to cry and that didn’t happen,” Chance remembered. “Usually, when you have a baby, you see him right away and really get to look at him. Not this time. They held him up for me for just a second then took him off to the side.” Although respiratory insufficiency is not uncommon in premature infants, Baker had to be resuscitated multiple times during his NICU stay. His right lung collapsed and doctors also noticed an unusual number of skin lesions. A CT scan the day before discharge later showed lesions were also visible on his lungs. No other Langerhans Cell Histiocytosis patients had ever been as young as Baker.
