O’FALLON, Mo. — Austen Mary Fields, a 14-year-old whose cancer diagnosis pushed her parents to search far and wide for a cure, died at home early Saturday.
“We love you Austen Mary,” her mother, Cyndi, wrote in a Facebook post. “You are our baby girl, our Bean. Words could never express the loss in our lives.”
Austen Mary Fields, seen in a photo taken last fall, was diagnosed earlier this year with a rare sarcoma, a cancer of the soft tissue.
Austen and her family's search for a cure were featured in a Post-Dispatch story last week.
In February, Eric Fields had taken his daughter to urgent care, thinking she might have the flu. She was admitted to Cardinal Glennon Children’s Hospital that day. A month later, her oncologists determined that the brick-sized tumor pressing on her kidney was exceedingly rare: TFE3 Rearranged PEComa, stage 4.
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PEComas, a subtype of soft-tissue sarcomas, affect about 1 in 3.3 million people. There is no standard of care for Austen’s type of PEComa, but her parents were determined to save her.
They called every major cancer center in the country, joined social media support groups and dug into reams of research. Meanwhile, Austen was in and out of the hospital. Most of the time, she didn’t have the energy to do the things she enjoyed: act in her school’s Theater Club, bake cookies, dream up craft projects.
Cyndi and Eric thought they might have an answer in an experimental treatment at a Mexican cancer clinic run by an American doctor. They started a , and on June 16, the family boarded a plane to Cabo San Lucas. By then, Austen’s scans showed dozens of tumors on her liver, lungs and lymph nodes.
After the family arrived in Cabo San Lucas, the clinic rejected Austen. She was too weak, they said. So the Fieldses found another treatment center, this one in Tijuana.
Austen finished a three-week regimen there and arrived back home two weeks ago. Her parents felt hopeful that a scan at the end of this month would show the tumors had shrunk. Then, they would decide what to do next.
But Austen “felt crummy,” her mom said. She didn’t want to eat or talk. It was hard for her to move.
On Friday night, Cyndi and Eric could tell that Austen had taken a turn. She didn’t seem to be in pain. For six hours, they held her.
“We fought like hell to save your life, and we are sorry we couldn’t,” Cyndi wrote on Facebook the next afternoon. “You are an amazing daughter, sister, granddaughter, cousin, niece and friend.”
In addition to her parents, Austen is survived by two brothers, Caleb and Alexander. She would have started high school next month at St. Dominic in O'Fallon.
