Unsent Love Letters | Son Chaeyoung

ᴅᴀʏ 2

[ Jeno, remember the flower you gave me? You said it's called white angel. That poor thing was still kept in between the pages of my notebook but sadly, it's not as white as it is before. ]

After putting a period on the last sentence of her letter, Kallea realized she's been writing to Jeno for 7 years already.

Being a home-schooled student, she's thankful she has the enthusiasm and the passion to write letters. It was like a hobby, like how other girls loves to color their nails.

But she wouldn't realize she's fond about it until she wrote one for Jeno. He practically saved her from boredom.

It's never easy for Kallea to spend years locked on her shielded room. She's one of those children who have defects in their immune cells and as a result have problems fighting infections. Severe Combined Immunodeficiency which was popularly known as SCID is a very rare group of inherited disorders characterized by absent T- and B- cell function. It simply means that their immune system is not working correctly so they get infections easily.

Her disease is not contagious but it is fatal especially in her early years. She has undergone screening and blood tests that's why it was monitored early during her infancy.

Since the day her parents found out about her fragile health condition, they find a way to give her a lifesaving treatment. It was through Hematopoietic stem cell transplantation whereas she received stem cells from a donor. Ideally, the stem cell should come from a sibling who is a close tissue match but she doesn't have one, so they get her an unrelated donor.

Transplants from matched siblings brings a higher chance to restore immune function and it was indeed lifesaving but oftentimes, it only partially restore immunity.

Nevertheless, Kallea gets cured and lived the next four years of her life normally like any other kid does. She could play with dirt in the backyard, eat ice cream, swim in the pool, spend the whole day in the playground... but those days didn't last long and covered her whole childhood because when she entered preschool as a five year old toddler, everything has changed.

Her parents thought she got fully recovered with the disease when she was an infant but all the symptoms came back one day, itchy and red skin, hair loss, extremely high fever, diarrhea. It doesn't seem normal at all so her parents had decided to admit her in the hospital once again.

Then they found out that it wasn't just a SCID all along, because it's a Leaky SCID since the beginning. It has the symptoms similar to typical SCID but the difference is that some T cells leak through and make Kallea's cell count seem normal. However, the T cell production doesn't help to fight infections. They become over-activated and cause the body to attack itself instead.

Kallea was only five when she learned about her real disease. Her parents told her that she was a SCID patient survivor before, but it still confused her whenever they would wordlessly rush her to the hospital, whenever they would scream at each other when they thought she's asleep, and why her mom were always in tears.

She asked them why that time and they told her the situation that she's still severely sick and needs meticulous protection. Her body reacts with viruses, bacteria and other invaders sensitively that even having a simple flu can put her life at risk.

As a kid, she already knew she'll hear something bad about her health but what she wanted to know was why her parents are fighting.

Isolating oneself with other people is not necessarily a must for a SCID patient, but Kallea's mom chose that way to keep her protected. She decided for good to let Kallea stay and live the rest of her life inside of that shielded room that even her—the parent—were not allowed to be with her own daughter.