Joesph Esquibel with the Lowry High School baseball team after throwing his first pitch.
Editor’s note: The treatments are counts from his mother.
Prior to the last home baseball games of the year, 16-year-old Joesph Esquibel was honored by the Lowry High School baseball team to throw out the first pitch. With his family behind him, Esquibel threw a strike down the middle of the plate.
Esquibel is the middle child of seven and has been fighting for his life for over 18 months, after receiving his official diagnosis of high risk (stage 4) neuroblastoma in October of 2022.
His journey to find out why he was sick started in August/September 2022.
After his diagnoses he has been traveling every two weeks to Salt Lake City for treatments for a week at a time.
He has had many chemotherapies, scans, stem cell retrievals, bone marrow aspirations, biopsies, blood transfusions, platelet transfusions, stem cell transfusions, six cycles of immunotherapy, T-cell retrieval and surgery to remove his primary tumor.
Joesph Esquibel with his family.
He takes numerous medications and has to have shots to boost his immune system before treatments. His scans early on have shown he was not responded to any of the previous treatments.
The option we were given was MIBG therapy in Colorado. We were there from Aug. 6-24 getting the first treatment, where he was in a lead room by himself, I would go in every four hours to administer medications and help him with whatever he needs and only could be in there for a few minutes at a time so my exposure to the radiation wasn’t too much.
After we arrived home, he had to be secluded for 10 days with minimal contact with small siblings because of lingering radiation in his body. He had a scan on October 18 which showed he did not respond to the treatment, so he started another round of MIBG therapy the end of October in hopes of getting a response the second time.
You can only get this type of radiation two times in your life because of the high doses of radiation being infused into your body. We went back to Colorado December 11 to find out he had a very minimal response to the MIBG therapy.
Doctors decided to do a bridge chemotherapy/immunotherapy the last week in December because it had been so long since he had any type of treatment. This caused him to lose his hair for a second time. He also started proton therapy (newer treatment) and photon therapy (traditional radiation). He had 12 treatments of each of those.
He also started getting a different type of immunotherapy that they use in New York City called Naxitmab that started on January 22, 2024. He is the first patient to get this medication in Salt Lake City so there was a lot of preparation taken to get ready for it.
He has received 4 cycles of this very harsh treatment so far! The side effects have been terrible he experiences extreme pain during the treatments, which they control with lots and lots of pain medications. He has constant blurry vision, dilated eyes, low blood pressures at times, high blood pressures at times and neuropathy in his feet.
If the following treatments don’t work, they are looking at a study being conducted in Philadelphia (CHOP) called the
CarT trial that he would be eligible for currently, we will be traveling to Philadelphia for a consultation on May 30th.
They have already retrieved his TCells at the beginning of April in preparation for this trial. This trial is so amazing and could be a game changer for childhood cancers.
Joseph is an amazing kid that never complains about anything, he does all that he is told with a smile and is doing well at the present time. He continues to go to school on line and shows determination to finish school and graduate next year with his class!
Joseph is still an active member of the Warrior Youth Team (drug and alcohol prevention group) as much as he can.
He wins the hearts of all he comes into contact with, his smile is contagious.
Joseph loves Baseball and is a big fan of the Buffalo Bills. He is an amazing son, friend, uncle, nephew, team mate and all-around human. We have had so much support, love and prayers from our community and we are so thankful for it all.
We ask for as many prayers as possible so our sweet son can overcome this terrible disease. Joseph is a true superhero.