SPANISH FORT, Ala. — “Are y’all the Jackson family? We’ve been waiting on you.”

Allison Jackson had barely touched down in Memphis, Tenn., the week before Christmas with 15-month-old Noah, but it was those simple — heartfelt — words that snapped her out of a daze.

Less than 12 hours earlier, Jackson’s pediatrician in Mobile had diagnosed her son with acute lymphocytic leukemia, and the world stopped.

“Sometimes it seems like it was yesterday, and sometimes it seems like it never happened — like it was someone else’s life,” Jackson said from her home in Spanish Fort. Noah, now 6, goofed off watching a movie nearby with little brothers, 3-year-old Owen and 2-year-old Will.

Dec. 15 marks the fifth anniversary of Noah’s diagnosis with the fast-growing cancer of the white blood cells, and — thanks to St. Jude Children’s Hospital — her oldest has been in remission for more than four years.

“I’ll never forget the look on his face,” Jackson said of her pediatrician the day she received the news that changed her family’s life forever.

“Immediately, you say, ‘No way, not my child,’ and then I just lost it,” said Jackson, who had brought Noah in for a routine follow-up flu shot. When she brought him in one month earlier for the first round, Jackson said she was worried then by her son’s pale coloring and bruising, but the office was rushed, and they only saw a nurse.

“I told myself if he was still bruising when we went back, I’d talk to the doctor about it because I bruise pretty easily, and I thought maybe it was just a genetic thing,” she said.

Her doctor told her, however, he knew something was amiss the second he saw Noah that day and he even consulted the child’s one-year well-baby check-up records to see if there had been anything overlooked in the routine blood work.

There hadn’t.

Editor’s Note: Five years ago Noah Jackson was diagnosed with acute lymphocytic leukemia. This is the first in a two-part series examining the family’s journey to restore his health and the

specialty children’s hospital that made it possible.

See the rest of this story in the Dec. 10 edition of The Bulletin.