LIGHTHOUSE POINT, Fla. – What began as a heartbreaking story now has a happy ending.
When we first met Rocco Passaro in late 2022, he was on a downward spiral in the fight against B-lymphoblastic leukemia.
“I’ve seen my son suffer and deal with things that no human being should ever have to endure,” said his mother, Ida Passaro.
At the time, his only hope for long-term survival was a bone marrow transplant.
“At that point, I had already given our fate to the universe, to God and our community,” Passaro said.
And the universe responded.
Following blood and bone marrow testing for transplant, Rocco’s lead specialist came back with a stunning finding.
“And he’s like, ‘I talked to the whole team. I talked to all the doctors and they agree: We’re comfortable with these tests. Rocco doesn’t need his transplant.’ He had no cancer,” she said.
Dr. Iftikhar Hanif, Chief of the Center of Cancer and Blood Disorders at Joe DiMaggio Children’s Hospital, said the results came after treating Rocco with an immunotherapy agent.
“And that drug is called Blinatumomab, so we gave him two courses of that and after that, we did another test, another bone marrow test, and it showed no evidence of disease and we performed a more sensitive test that actually showed no leukemia in more than a million cells that were analyzed,” Hanif said.
When Rocco was first diagnosed back in the summer of 2021, Passaro kept asking doctors, “Why is this happening to my son?”
“And their answer (was), ‘This is a God thing. We don’t know why this happened,’” she said. “So, to come full circle two years later and hear ‘your son is cured, and this is a God thing,’ is just the most incredible feeling knowing that if you really, really want something and you do the things and you believe, it can happen.”
According to the American Cancer Society, leukemia is the most common cancer in children and teens, accounting for almost 1 out of 3 cancers.