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Luis “Lou” Gonzalez left an undeniably lasting impact on every person he met at Texas A&M University-Kingsville. “To know Lou was to love him,” his mother, Cindie DeLeon, expressed, as her eyes lit up and a warm smile swept across her face.
That impression on others could be attributed to a myriad of things – Lou’s unending kindness, passion for education, love of the outdoors, and dedication to family, especially his mother, who raised him as a single parent for many years of his childhood. Each of these characteristics laid the foundation of Lou’s personality as a one-in-a-million kind of guy – and when he started becoming unexplainably ill, these traits created his armor for battle.
Sore throats and rapid weight loss were just a few of the unexplained symptoms that first plagued Lou during his second year of college. “There was joint pain, fatigue, excessive weight loss lasting from October 2015 to March 2016,” Cindie revealed. The family found themselves in and out of emergency rooms, doctors’ offices, specialists – anywhere that may have answers. Doctors racked their brains for a solution, but the only diagnosis they could muster was rheumatoid arthritis. “At that point, we were desperate,” she admitted.
Exhausted by the unknown, and with Lou’s symptoms only progressing, Cindie expressed her gratefulness for finding Dr. Aleman-Weinmann, a specialist in Corpus who refused to back down from the truth. Blood was drawn, tests were ordered – but the phone call that resulted was the catalyst for one of the hardest days in Cindie’s life. “[Dr. Aleman-Weinmann] calls me and asks where I’m at, and my husband is on a business trip and was literally up in the air on the plane … and she doesn’t even sugar coat it. She says ‘Cindie, it’s Leukemia.’”
In an instant, her world shattered – the news, a parent’s worst nightmare. But even in the midst of the trauma, Lou’s irreplaceable personality prevailed. “I’m blowing my husband’s phone up, and he can’t answer, and I’m thinking Lou’s at home … and the thing about my son was he was always hungry,” she quipped. “So I’m literally having the meltdown of my life while he’s asking me to bring him food.”
She describes the shock and inability for it to sink in, as she and her husband, Gilbert, Lou’s step-father, sat down to share the news with Lou at home. She also describes the overwhelming, fast-paced scenario that unfolded instantly as they began their journey to treatment. “We went to the oncologist and they didn’t even touch Lou – they just said, ‘I think you all need to go to MD Anderson.’ Everybody knows MD Anderson,” Cindie sighed. On Mother’s Day, Lou was admitted and began his fight.
“Eight doctors, all in lab coats, came into Lou’s room and they tell us that they were going to start him on chemo,” she explained, “But the series of tests that came with that … wow. You’re talking bone marrow biopsies, blood work, MRIs, Cat Scans – all in two days.” And through the chaos, she admits that her son’s strength didn’t falter. That he took the tests, the poking and prodding, never ceasing to quit asking his doctor when he could return to the university to take his finals. “That’s all he cared about, I can’t stress that enough,” she said. “But we ended up being there for the next 6 months … the regimen they put him on, they were hoping he’d go into remission faster than he did. They didn’t want to have the stem-cell transplant. That wasn’t originally in the cards.”
However, doctors decided they had to move forward with the transplant, as Lou was seeing no relief. Tears glistening her eyes, Cindie relived the disheartening news, “Over 27-30 million people in the database, and they couldn’t find one match.” A cord blood transplant was Lou’s only option, and it left him confined to his hospital room for over 37 days. “That was brutal, and Lou pretty much shut down because he got a taste of life that was horrific,” she explained.
Despite the insurmountable challenges faced each day, Lou was able to get to a place of normalcy. He was even able to return to Texas A&M University-Kingsville in June 2017, which he had fought for all along. “He was all set up for summer school, and so excited to start alongside his best friend. And it’s the first day of class, I’m out of town, and his best friend calls me to tell me that Lou pretty much passed out in class,” she continued, “He had developed a skin rash on his face, had welts, and we found out the Leukemia was back.”
With the only cure for leukemia being a stem-cell transplant, again, there was no match for Lou. “It was basically like the first year of battle was for nothing. How do you tell a kid that?” she reflected. “But he just wanted his life back – and he found his love for fishing and kayaking. We found some videos on his Go Pro, and talk about peaceful. Now we know why he loved it so much – that was his happy place.”
The doctors ended up choosing Lou’s biological father as his best chance for a haploid transplant, which utilizes a partial donor. “Lou from the get go kept telling me he didn’t want to do it, but his stem-cell transplant doctor told him it wouldn’t be as hard as the first one. So Lou took that to heart, we all did, because the first one was hard,” she admitted. After many setbacks – including being admitted into the hospital with pancreatitis – Lou finally received his transplant. “And that’s when he got really sick, really fast,” Cindie explained.
On Mother’s Day, once again, Cindie, Gilbert, and their family faced devastating news. “That night, his oxygen level kept dropping. And they had to intubate him, and that night, my baby was just sitting there and said, ‘I don’t care, let them. I’m tired, Mom.’” Painfully seared into her memory, Cindie expressed that was the last time she got to hear her son’s voice. “We didn’t know what the future was going to bring us.”
Cindie holds close to her heart the last hug Lou gave her in the hospital before his passing, and she builds her strength steadily each day upon Lou’s legacy of kindness, which continues to inspire and impact so many lives. She expresses her extreme gratitude for her husband – their rock and support through everything – as well as family and friends who there for Lou every step of his journey, allowing him to find joy in some of the roughest moments.
To ensure nobody else ever has to hear there isn’t a match for them in the system, Cindie also urges others to donate to the national bone marrow registry. And every Sept. 25th is now proclaimed Leukemia Awareness #BeLouish Day in Corpus Christi, Texas. “That day, we asked everyone to do a random act of kindness, and Corpus Christi really came forward with that, and we had some really beautiful stories. And it was all in honor of him.”
“We’ve had events, and we created scholarships. In 2019, we gave over $10,000 in his honor for the Coastal Bend at Moody High School and at Texas A&M-Kingsville because education was so important to him. It’s been amazing … people want to help. People want to make sure his legacy doesn’t die.”
To learn more about Lou’s story, visit his Facebook Page by searching Team Lou. To learn more about the Luis Adan Gonzalez Memorial Scholarship at Texas A&M-Kingsville, please visit https://tamuk.academicworks.com. If interested in donating to his scholarship for the Coastal Bend Community Foundation, please contact Nicole Ross, program director, at nross@cbcfoundation.org or by calling 361.882.9745. And to join Be the Match in Lou’s honor, simply text Lou to 61474 to have a swab kit mailed to you.
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