In a cozy, dimly lit hospital room, a newborn baby boy is cradled in his mother's arms. The room is filled with joyful tears and smiles from family members. A pink & purple tie-dyed heart-shaped pillow stands nearby, as does a birth photographer, capturing this intimate moment in its essence.
Friday morning, March 22, 2024, at 2:50 AM, the world welcomed a beautiful baby boy weighing eight pounds and five ounces. He was everything this family had been waiting for. From the moment Miller J. Rowan Wallace was born, everything changed. Mason and Michelle embraced their new roles as mom and dad. Marccus became an uncle. Across the room, Matt and Aricca experienced the joy of becoming grandparents for the first time - a title Aricca had almost never had.
Aricca Crosson was born and raised in Minneapolis, Kansas, but attended high school in Dodge City. Her senior year, she began dating Matthew Wallace from the nearby town of Kinsley. After high school, they moved to Manhattan in 1995 to attend K-State. They got married and Aricca became pregnant with their first child, Mason. A few years later, their second son, Marccus, joined the family.
In 2010, Matt and Aricca took a leap of faith and started a new business, Cat Cans Portable Services of Manhattan. Matt ran the truck, while Aricca handled phone calls. In addition, she was also Manhattan’s award-winning Aflac representative. They were raising their boys and building a unique and important business. Everything was going according to the plan, until June 2011.
Cat Cans was getting prepared for their first Country Stampede, which was a big event for a company in its infancy. There, Aricca experienced unexplained symptoms. While it resembled the symptoms she had been enduring, undiagnosed, for three years, this time was different. Despite having these symptoms for a few years, her annual pap smear in April had come back normal. Initially, she thought it might be due to the stress of the event, but it worsened to the point of hemorrhaging. She called her OB-GYN, Dr. Mark Gros, for an immediate exam. On June 26th, a biopsy was performed. Then, on July 1, 2011, everything changed.
On that hot summer day, she received the coldest phone call of her life. She was with 12-year-old Mason and their wrestling club, at the Auto Zone on Ft. Riley Blvd, hosting a car wash to pay for wrestling camp. She was told to come to the office, and it wasn’t good. The diagnosis was cervical cancer. Squamous cell carcinoma, to be exact.
She was referred to the Research Medical Center in Kansas City, and the care of Dr. Verda (Hunter) Hicks. After an internal exam, she revealed to the 34-year-old Aricca she had a tumor the size of a newborn baby’s head on her cervix. Scans revealed that the cancer had spread to her lymph nodes, and it was a stage III diagnosis.
They knew they couldn’t perform surgery because the tumor was too large. The first step was chemotherapy and radiation to try to shrink the tumor, with surgery scheduled to remove lymph nodes in her pelvis. The original plan was 12 rounds of chemotherapy, but it was boosted to 18 rounds.
In January 2012, new scans revealed that while the cancer was no longer in her cervix, it had spread to the lymph nodes in her lungs. Her next visit was to Barnes-Jewish Hospital in St. Louis, where they provided neither help nor good news. Seeking another opinion, she then went to MD Anderson in Houston. In February 2012, she was informed that while more chemotherapy could help control the cancer, it couldn't be cured, and she was likely to have less than a year to live.
After, Matt and Aricca sat in a parking garage in Texas, enveloped in a fog of disbelief. Suddenly, a woman appeared seemingly out of nowhere, offering a pink and purple tie-dyed heart pillow, and the comfort of a prayer. She gave Aricca the pillow, prayed with them, and then disappeared.
Before long, she was back in Kansas City, starting a new chemotherapy regimen from at Research Medical Center. Around mid-April, after Easter, Dr. Hicks suggested a recovery break. During this time, Dr. Christian Hinrichs, a researcher at the National Institutes of Health (NIH), reached out to Dr. Hicks. Dr. Hinrichs, a UMKC medical school graduate who had done a surgery rotation with Dr. Hicks at Research Medical Center, had been researching cervical cancer at the NIH, and had just received approval for a clinical trial. He needed a patient. Aricca was soon off to Bethesda, Maryland.
The first step was to find a surgeon willing to take the risk of harvesting T-cells —the body's "fighter" cells—from the tumor in her lung lymph nodes near her aorta.
While she went home to rest, the NIH grew her T-cells in a lab, cultivating over a billion cells to fight the tumor as if it were a virus. When she returned in August 2012, she first underwent seven days of chemotherapy to completely decimate her immune system. Then, they injected her with the T-cells, which launched a powerful attack on the cancer. After 23 days, her immune system had recovered enough for her to return home.
On September 16th, new scans were taken, and Dr. Hinrichs informed her that some tumors were 50% smaller, and some were completely gone. By December 19th, 2012, there were no signs of cancer at all. After 11 and a half years, patient number two is still cancer-free.
She was able to witness Mason capture three state 6A wrestling championships for Manhattan High, and fulfill his dream of becoming a Division I college wrestler at the University of Tennessee-Chattanooga. She saw Marccus graduate from high school as an outstanding baseball player. She helped Matt grow Cat Cans into a powerhouse business, with both sons now heavily involved in its operations. She co-founded the Bargain Boutique in downtown Manhattan. She enjoys spending time at their vacation home in Pagosa Springs, Colorado, where they are actively building a convenience store called Basecamp. She is still an advocate for always getting a second opinion. But above all, she cherishes being "Gramma A" to baby Miller - a title she fought with her life to earn.
“It is so important to advocate for yourself”
“Get another opinion. Always get another opinion. Even if you haven’t been diagnosed, but you’re still having symptoms, go to another doctor. Get another opinion - it could save your life!”