Kennedi Jackson had lived most of her childhood in debilitating pain, or in fear of excruciating agony.
The daughter of former Mississippi Delta Community College President Dr. Tyrone and Kashanta Jackson, Kennedi, 13, is learning to live her best life one year after becoming the youngest person at the time to receive stem cell transplants as a curative measure for sickle cell.
“One looking at her would think that she was a healthy child, but she was not,” Kashanta told The Enterprise-Tocsin in an interview, days before the Jackson family said goodbye to Sunflower County.
Dr. Jackson took over as president of Southeast Arkansas College this week after announcing his retirement this spring from MDCC and the state of Mississippi.
Life over the past five years for the Jackson family has been challenging to say the least.
Dr. Jackson took over as president of MDCC in 2019, and Kashanta most recently served as director of health and counseling services at Delta State University.
Their oldest son Tyler, who graduated from Indianola Academy in May, had been a multi-sport athlete for most of his life.
Kennedi, who today seems to be all smiles and optimistic about the future, suffered through most of those years, not even being able to see her brother play high school baseball until this past spring.
Her parents said that they received a call from the doctor just a few days after Kennedi was born, and they were informed that she had tested positive for sickle cell, a disease that passes on genetically when both parents carry the sickle cell trait.
“We had to have the trait, and we never knew that we had the sickle cell traits (until we were tested),” Kashanta said.
It turned out that Kennedi had the most severe form of the disease, which by the age of 5 was beginning to present itself in the form of what doctors call a “crisis” when pain for the patient becomes unbearable.
Extreme temperatures could trigger a crisis, Kashanta said.
“She could not stand a lot of the heat,” she said, “Cold was deadly for her.”
Sickle cell patients are also susceptible to strokes and organ failure.
Kennedi said that the first major crisis happened when she was 8 years old.
“In third grade, I was in P.E., and I was going back to my class, and I felt a really bad pain in my back,” she said. “The students didn’t know what to do, nor the teacher, so the teacher had to call my mom.”
At the time, both parents were working at Hinds Community College, and Kennedi was attending Clinton Public Schools.
“When I went to the school to pick her up, she was in her principal’s office, and he had wrapped her in a blanket on the floor, and her pain was so bad, to touch her, she cringed,” Kashanta said. “That was devastating. From that point on, it’s like the pain just intensified.”
Shortly after that, Kennedi was diagnosed with chronic pain.
“She had some type of pain every day,” Kashanta said.
There was also the trauma from that first major crisis and having her friends witness the events as they unfolded.
At first, Kennedi did not want to go back to school.
“Everybody saw me on the floor, crying and stuff, so I didn’t want to go back to school. My mom and dad had to help me go into the classroom,” she said.
The situation was not easy for her father either.
“It’s extremely difficult to watch your child go through that pain,” Dr. Jackson said. “You would rather have the pain yourself.”
Over the next few years, Kennedi would have multiple crises a year, spending days and at times weeks in the hospital.
“She’s always maintained good grades, even being in the hospital for weeks at a time,” Kashanta said.
For most of the duration of Kennedi’s illness, she received care at Blair E. Batson Children’s Hospital in Jackson.
Doctors there had suggested a bone marrow transplant as treatment. Tyler, her older brother, came back as a half match, but at the time, Batson was not doing half match transplants, Kashanta said.
They then turned their attention to her father, but the hospital began doing half-match bone marrow transplants shortly after that.
“We’re ready to do the bone marrow transplant with Tyler being the donor, and COVID hit,” Kashanta said.
That delay might have been a blessing. There were a lot of risks that came with the bone marrow transplant.
That is when Kennedi’s doctors approached the family about a new process, which was in clinical trials at the time.
The procedure, which was being done at the time at TriStar Medical Center in Nashville, uses the patient’s own stem cells as a curative measure.
At first, the Jacksons were hesitant.
“We thought, ‘No, we’re not going to do it,’” Kashanta said. “She would be the youngest to do it in the world.”
It turns out that the first person to ever undergo the procedure lived in Hattiesburg, Kashanta said. The family spoke with that person, and after a lot of prayer, they decided together that the stem cell transplant was the best option.
“It was an extremely challenging time, going back and forth to Nashville and Jackson. By the grace of God, He brought us through it,” Dr. Jackson said.
It turned to be a very intense process, which involved a four-month stay in the hospital for Kennedi.
She went through a procedure to protect her eggs, because the next step was chemotherapy, which can cause infertility.
“It was a tedious process gearing up for the actual transplant,” Kashanta said. “Before getting the stem cells, you have to wipe everything out, getting rid of all of the old and putting in new stem cells.”
Kashanta said that Kennedi’s stem cells were sent off and were reshaped, because patients with sickle cell often have crescent-shaped blood cells, instead of round.
“Some of her blood cells were crescent shaped,” Kashanta said. “The idea was to make hers round.”
After years of pain and months of waiting on the procedure to be completed, the day finally came when doctors restored her stem cells.
Kennedi said that she remembers the moment they pushed her stem cells back into her body vividly.
“It felt like my soul left my body,” she said. “I felt like a new person. It felt weird.”
The procedure has been a success thus far. It has surpassed the trial stage and is now approved by the Food & Drug Administration.
One year after receiving the transplant, Kennedi was able to brave the Mississippi Delta heat and go watch her brother play baseball for the Colonels during his senior season.
“I can do a lot of things I couldn’t do when I was sick and hurting all of the time,” Kennedi said.
The family is so confident in Kennedi’s recovery that they celebrated Dr. Jackson’s retirement from MDCC by spending a week in Hawaii.
As Kennedi approaches high school, she said that her favorite subject is science, and after spending most of her childhood in and out hospitals, she said she would one day like to enter the medical field.
“I want to help kids how the nurses helped me,” Kennedi said. “I want to be a nurse.”
