Taylor Brown is a young cross country, track and field athlete for Greenbrier Middle School. So when she texted her mom during school that she was hurting and couldn’t run laps, Shannon Brown knew something was wrong.
“My heart sunk… it wasn’t normal behavior for her,” said Shannon. “Then I thought of the unexplained bruising, ’cause she had two areas of unexplained bruising…and the bruising was so severe you would remember hitting something that hard. So, when I’d see the two bruises she’s like ‘Oh, I can’t explain how they got there.’ ”
The 12-year-old girl’s symptoms were diagnosed as severe idiopathic aplastic anemia, a disorder where the bone marrow stops creating new red blood cells to replace those that die naturally in the body. The cause often cannot be identified, as was the case for Taylor.
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