Why Are Kids in Waycross Getting Cancer?

Fourteen-year-old Lexi Crawford was attacked by lower back pain so sharp that she couldn’t even sit up to eat. Her mother had to bring her food while she was lying flat on her back. Doctors in Waycross, GA, the small town where she lives, thought it was a kidney infection. But after months of antibiotics didn’t clear it up, a visiting doctor in the local ER suggested an X-ray.

What he saw on the scan was terrifying.

Black spots covered Lexi’s spine. “That’s cancer,” he told her mother, Cristy Rice. “I don’t know what kind it is, or where else it is, but that’s cancer.”

As Lexi first started feeling sick, in a house across town, 2-year-old Harris Lott began complaining that his stomach hurt. He suddenly lost the ability to urinate, and his parents, who are both doctors, rushed him to an emergency room. He was diagnosed with an infection. After treatment, he was fine for a while, but a few weeks later, the problem returned, and a urologist said it was time for more tests. They found a tumor the size of a grapefruit in his abdomen.

A few days later, doctors told the grandparents of 5-year-old Gage Walker, who lives 14 miles east in nearby Hoboken, GA, that the unrelenting stomach pain he’d had for weeks was probably constipation. For 2 months, doctors sent him home with laxatives. “He would just cry and cry and cry. I thought something was really wrong,’” says his grandmother, Ellen Walker. It, too, turned out to be cancer.

The same cancer.

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