Molly Margaret's Miracle

Hi, we’re so glad you’re here! If we don’t know you, we would’ve loved to have met you under different circumstances but here we are and either way, we’re glad our paths have crossed. We’re the O’Quinns – Neal, Mackenzie and Molly Margaret. The furry lil guy in this picture is Manny (short for Manteo, our favorite place in the world) – he’s an important part of this story as he’s the only one who has been allowed into every single scan, surgery, treatment, and appointment with Molly Margaret. They’re best buds.

We thought we’d give you some background as to what’s going on in our lives and why we started this blog. It’s not a story we ever thought we’d be writing but when God calls us to witness it’s rarely how we’d prefer. Early on in this journey we felt convicted that the Lord was using this story and asking us to share. So we’re doing our best to walk in obedience and share. We know the more people that hear Molly Margaret’s story, the more people get to watch our God work. And that makes this all worth it. It’s not really about us after all, it’s about a good Father sustaining His children and He alone will get the glory.

It all started with a barely noticeable eye flicker. Neal and I both noticed it the same day, but it was fast and happened once. About four days later, it started increasing in frequency. Molly Margaret also began slightly losing her balance when sitting and crawling. On a Wednesday evening we ended up at an urgent care, followed by a pediatrician visit Thursday morning and a decision to go into the ER at Duke Friday morning so we could get answers. We knew we needed to be seen by a pediatric neurologist and thought this would be our best bet at getting to one as quick as possible. We were right. That Friday in the ER was a whirlwind – lots of questions, observations, tests, scans, blood work. We were admitted for what we thought would be a day or two to get to the bottom of it. An EEG confirmed she wasn’t having seizures, thank you Lord. A CT scan showed nothing abnormal in her brain, praise you Jesus. We were quickly ruling out all of the big, scary things that could be affecting Molly Margaret. And then an MRI. I’ll never forget the moment our doctors came in and wanted to talk to us. I knew as soon as I saw them. They told us there was a mass in her abdomen. The last “big scary thing” we were trying to rule out, just got ruled in, front and center. I cannot even find the words to type to explain what that night was like. At this point, the likelihood of it being benign seemed very low because of the other symptoms we were seeing. The next day doctors and surgeons flooded the room with a plan. Surgery – the mass is small, let’s just get it out. Then a CT scan that revealed it was intertwined tightly with her right kidney and main arteries. Too risky. Our surgeon came in just moments before we were to go down for surgery and said we needed to pause. He said he was consulting with doctors all around the country on her case. That smacked me right in the face. Thank goodness for all of these brilliant people working on her case but at the same time why are there people around the country working on my daughter’s case??? How did we end up in a situation like this?? The plan changed (it’s always changing, we’re learning), surgery was postponed and a MIBG scan was performed to determine if this was in fact neuroblastoma. It was. But it appeared localized. At this point it was determined that the neuroblastoma tumor had triggered MM’s immune system to attack her nervous system resulting in OMS, a rare disorder that affects 1 in 5 million. This was responsible for the flickering eyes and loss of balance we were seeing. Now we had not one but two disorders we had to address.

Molly Margaret immediately received a treatment (IVIG) for OMS in the hospital. We were told not to expect to see any improvement for at least 6 weeks. But God! Within 36 hours, Molly Margaret’s symptoms were ~90% gone. Amazing. Truly remarkable. The following Monday (October 18th) MM underwent a surgery to biopsy the tumor, take a bone marrow biopsy and place a port in her chest. The surgeon expected that he would only be able to take a tiny biopsy of the tumor, but was able to remove about 50% of the mass. Her bone marrow biopsy came back clear and the tumor biopsy came back showing Group 2 neuroblastoma. The doctors said we were on the low side of intermediate risk and Molly Margaret would be undergoing two rounds of chemo. Not a word we ever hoped to hear. At this point, we found a naturopathic doctor to join our team and help us navigate ways we could support and care for Molly Margaret’s body to give her the best chance of fighting this cancer as well as to mitigate the effects of chemo on her small body. Over the last few years we have switched many of our common household products to cleaner versions, limiting the amount of toxins we come in contact with as much as possible. We’ve seen such amazing impacts of this on our health and have been so conscious of it as we’ve made decisions during Molly Margaret’s first year of life. Chemo felt exactly the opposite of every decision we had made thus far. Bringing this doctor onto our team gave us so much peace of mind that we would still be able to support and detox her body in a way we felt comfortable with – another answered prayer.

As we were wrapping our minds around starting chemo with our daughter, one final genetic marker of the tumor came back positive which totally blindsided us. Every other genetic marker had come back negative and we thought we were in the clear. These markers indicate how aggressive a tumor is likely to be. This marker did not indicate a highly aggressive tumor but it did bump her diagnosis to Group 3 with a minimum of four rounds of chemo. Not what we were hoping to hear. And this is where we are now. We will continue to update you in the following posts as things change. We would love for you to join us in this Kingdom work by praying specifically and boldly with us as we ask God to heal our daughter and sharing this story and how God is working and moving.

We will likely never know on this side of Heaven why this is our story. But we do know that we serve a good good Father who has never left our side and surely won’t start now. One of our favorite coffee shops in Manteo has a prayer wall and on that wall it’s written “make heaven crowded”. This perfectly sums up our prayer during this season. If this is what we have to walk through, we’re sure as heck not going to waste it. We’re begging God daily to use this story to add numbers to the Kingdom. To strengthen our faith and the faith of anyone who hears Molly Margaret’s story. & we believe He is doing it.