SAN DIEGO — An Escondido teen boy has relapsed into cancer after he was in remission for a year. His doctors are racing to find the best course of treatment and a possible bone marrow match.
Now members of the Filipino community are being asked to help give him a chance to live.
The biggest obstacle now is getting 14-year-old Chase Riehl back into remission. Once in remission, doctors say his best chance of staying in remission is to get a bone marrow transplant from a donor who matches his ethnic profile of white and Filipino.
His doctors said his ideal donor will have a mix of both ethnicities and not necessarily only one ethnic group or the other.
Riehl’s mother was his first donor, now the search is on to find an unrelated donor.
“Chase is Chase, he is going to blaze his own trail and we are going to take it a day at a time,” said Sunshine “Sunny” Riehl, Chase’s mother.
Chase is 14 years-old and should be in school, hanging out with friends and playing his favorite. Instead, he has spent the past year and a half fighting an aggressive form of acute T-cell leukemia.
Sunny said in March 2022, Chase complained of leg and back pain, but doctors chalked it up to a possible sports injury. Sunny said she felt that was not right, and checked with his primary care physician, and after more blood testing doctors diagnosed Chase with Leukemia in May 2022.
“He got home, he packed for the hospital. He was then the one that came to me and said, ‘Mom, I have an 80% chance of beating this,’ he said ‘I got this’ and we said OK and we went in with Chase’s mentality, like we got this,” Sunny said.
In his first year of treatment, Chase underwent several rounds of chemotherapy and blood transfusions.
“We got really good at packing and unpacking, I can pack up a hospital room in a hospital room…we got really good at being very fluid,” Sunny said.
Chase entered remission in October 2022. His doctors told FOX 5 that he needed a bone marrow transplant to hopefully stay in remission. His mother stepped up to be a donor at a 50% match.
”There is nothing more special you could ever do to your child to be such an integral part of the treatment, but with it carries this fear of it not working,” Sunny said.
Nearly a year after his transplant, Chase’s bloodwork showed his cancer came back, and this time in his spinal fluid and bone marrow. He was back in the hospital four days before his 14th birthday.
“The fear is what more is Chase going to have to go through and how is he going to take the news,” Sunny said. “And he goes, kind of paused for a second…put his head back and said I got this…we’ve been through it before. I can do it again.”
What makes it more challenging for Chase into remission a second time, is how much his body can tolerate, and finding a treatment the cancer can respond to, according to Chase’s doctor.
“There is no standard of care at this point when you’ve had a relapse after transplant,” said Dr. Eric Anderson, Rady Children’s Director of Pediatric Blood and Marrow Transplant.
Anderson has been one of Chase’s doctors since his initial diagnosis. The new treatments include additional cells from his mother’s bone marrow.
“To see if that process can get rid of his abnormal cells and medicine in his spinal fluid,” Anderson said.
Anderson said Chase needs to be in remission before another transplant, but not from his mother again. Chase is a mix of European White and Filipino, but the National Marrow Donor online registry “Be The Match” reports only 9% or less than 900,000 out of 9 million potential U.S. donors are of Asian descent.
“Some mix of those mix of those ancestries in your past would be more likely to match with Chase than if he didn’t have those ancestries,” Anderson said.
Now Sunny is hoping to encourage people to see if they are a match and help those like Chase.
People who are interested in becoming a donor click here to visit Be The Match website.
“It truly saves lives. Chase would not be here today without a transplant,” Sunny said.