Young patient keeps her mom strong

SHELLY LEACHMAN, NEWS-PRESS STAFF WRITER

December 16, 2005 12:00 AM

Olivia Alvarez just wants to feel good. She wants to see her friends in Santa Maria, to get back to school. She wants to spend holidays at home.

This is the second Christmas that Olivia, 7, will celebrate in a hospital, where she's spent many of her days since being diagnosed with cancer in November 2004.

"I get frustrated," Olivia said from her bed at Los Angeles-area cancer hospital City of Hope, where she is recovering from a bone marrow transplant. "And I get mad sometimes, too. I just want to be better."

Olivia has Burkitt's lymphoma, an aggressive, non-Hodgkin's leukemia. She and her mom, Maria, 50, have been at City of Hope since October, when brother Marco, 25, donated his bone marrow to help his little sister.

The Alvarezes received donations of a different kind from a local aid organization, the Teddy Bear Cancer Foundation. After Olivia's diagnosis, Mrs. Alvarez was driving so often to Santa Barbara Cottage Hospital from the family's Santa Maria home that her car's transmission blew. The foundation got her a van -- used but fully functional, with new tires and paid-in-full registration. Mrs. Alvarez said the group has also helped her family pay some household bills.

One of two charities selected as beneficiaries of the annual News-Press Holiday Fund, the foundation offers financial aid and moral support and hosts frequent social events for families of area pediatric cancer patients.

"If I needed something, anything, she was there," Mrs. Alvarez said of foundation director Nikki Simon. "She's helped us out tremendously. It's been a blessing."

Monetary and morale boosters alike are a welcome respite in such tough times, said Mrs. Alvarez, recalling when her youngest child -- Olivia's four siblings range in age from 16 to 30 -- fell ill. Increasingly sick with high fevers, anemia and loss of appetite, doctors had trouble determining what was wrong, she said.

"It took too long (to find it). It was horrible," she said. "My husband and I were fighting; I was blaming him, he was blaming me."

After a battery of intense tests, a doctor told the Alvarezes that Olivia had rheumatoid arthritis. But the night before she was due at UCLA to see an arthritis specialist, Olivia got "a bloody nose that would not stop" and the leukemia was finally found, said Mrs. Alvarez. "We took her to the emergency room. That's when we found out we had to go to Cottage."

For families in such situations, "going to Cottage" is itself a diagnosis of sorts; the Santa Barbara hospital has the only children's cancer unit on the Central Coast.

Olivia, who was 6 at the time, said she recalls little of that day. "I had a bloody nose and I went to Santa Barbara," she said. "After that I don't remember anything. I just fell asleep."

Her mother, on the other hand, remembers so vividly that it still causes her pain. That is, until Olivia cheers her up, which both mother and daughter said happens often.

"I make her laugh and do funny stuff," Olivia said. "I make funny faces and tell jokes."

"She definitely keeps me strong," Mrs. Alvarez said. "There were times at the hospital when I thought I couldn't take it anymore. But she makes me forget about the sad things. She helps me look ahead. We just want her to get better. Then we'll spend the rest of our Christmases at home."