Steven's Legacy: Huffs' Battle vs. Cancer Wages On
Feb. 15, 2024
It was supposed to be the happiest time of the Huffs’ lives.
April had just given birth to their first child three months earlier. She had returned to work as a teacher and her husband, Steven, was trying to do what any first-time father does: figure out this entirely new and incredible responsibility of parenthood.
But Steven wasn’t feeling quite right. Weeks earlier, he had gone on a guys’ golf trip for a quick break but came back feeling exhausted and sick.
He bounced around from his general physician to walk-in clinics with varying but equally draining symptoms every day until, finally, on Oct. 11, 2018, Steven’s father forced him to go to the emergency room at Baptist Health in Lexington.
April’s father-in-law cut straight to the chase in the call to her: ‘I’m coming to get you. You need to get to the emergency room now. They think Steven has leukemia.”
“The next thing I know, I’m sitting in the office of the school … and I just kept repeating, ‘But we have a baby. We have a baby,’” April said. “My world was forever changed. … I just knew it was going to be hell on earth.”
Steven was diagnosed with acute myeloid leukemia, a type of cancer that starts in the blood-forming class of the bone marrow and interferes with the production of normal white blood cells, red blood cells and platelets.
AML is aggressive, and Steven’s numbers were so high that the medical staff told April that Steven’s leukemic white blood cell count was the highest they had ever seen in a person who walked into the ER under their own power.
“They said if we would have waited a day or two longer, he probably would have died from undiagnosed leukemia,” April said.
Steven was transferred to the University of Kentucky Markey Cancer Center to undergo immediate leukapheresis – essentially a filtering process of white blood cells from the bloodstream – and then chemotherapy. Soon after, the Huffs relocated to MD Anderson Cancer Center in Houston, one of the world’s leaders in cancer care, to tackle the diagnosis head on.
And for a while, they were winning. Between the daily cocktails of drugs and chemo, blood transfusions and a stem cell transplant, Steven reached remission. He was just 10 days away from returning home to Lexington for what was supposed to be a 100-day post-stem cell transplant recovery.
But as soon as April walked in the door in Lexington to get the house ready, the phone rang. It was Steven. He had relapsed.
That’s when the true “hell on earth” that April feared really set in. The treatment plans started all over again, but nothing worked this time. April watched as her 6-foot-3, 220-pound husband whittled down to 150 pounds of skin and bones.
Steven Huff died on March 17, 2020.
Steven’s legacy has lived on through April and their now 5-year-old daughter, Claire. April, who is now a campaign development manager at the Leukemia & Lymphoma Society, is making sure that Steven lives on by finding a cure for blood cancers and improving the quality of life for patients and their families.
One way to do that is through blood donation, which April had no idea about when this all began.
About the Leukemia & Lymphoma Society
The Leukemia & Lymphoma Sociate is at the forefront of the fight to cure blood cancer. LLS is the largest nonprofit dedicated to creating a world without blood cancers. Since 1949, LLS has invested more than $1.7 billion in groundbreaking research, pioneering many of today's most innovative approaches.
