At her 4-year-old birthday party in March, Blakely Boyle couldn't blow out her candles.
As little siblings do, one eagerly swooped in to blow them out for her, so her parents didn't think much of it in the moment.
Two days later, Blakely was diagnosed with cancer. For the past seven months, Blakely has been courageously battling T-cell lymphoblastic lymphoma.
She still has a long way to go, but the good news is she's kicking its butt. Her tumor is gone, and her nuclear PET scans, which test the function of organs and tissues, are clean.
On Sunday, the family will celebrate at M&T Bank Stadium, as Blakely will be the Ravens' honorary captain for their "Crucial Catch" game against the Los Angeles Rams. She'll be joined by her parents, Kristina and Ravens Legend Nick Boyle.
Nick made 121 catches over his eight-year Ravens career spanning from 2015-2022, but none were more clutch than the one Kristina and he made earlier this year.
There were very subtle signs. On her birthday, Blakely didn't eat her favorite meal, spaghetti and meatballs. The day after, Kristina noticed some swelling in her daughter's left chest area, so she made her schedule an appointment with their pediatrician.
The pediatrician thought it was a lipoma, a benign tumor made up of fat cells. Nothing to worry about, they said. But Kristina, who has a bachelor's degree in nursing, urged them to do an ultrasound.
"I'm no doctor here, and I'm not trying to offend anybody, but I do have some sort of medical background. And to me, this lump overnight with all these other symptoms just doesn't add up," Kristina told them.
The pediatrician put in a referral to get an ultrasound sometime in the next month or two. Luckily, there was a cancellation two days later, and the Boyles hopped on it. Before she had even finished the ultrasound, the technician left the room.
"I was just looking at her face, and I knew it was not good," Kristina said. "Right away, our pediatrician called us and said, 'Yeah, this is not a lipoma. I was wrong. You need to go right to the hospital.'"
They went to Morristown Medical Center in northern New Jersey and sat in the emergency room for a while, then on a bed in a hallway. Maybe this wasn't so urgent after all? After two or three hours of testing, however, they were led to a room with superheroes on the wall.
"I was shaking walking in there and Nick just immediately started crying," Kristina said.
It was there that a doctor told them Blakely had cancer with a tumor the size of a baseball. The tumor was touching her heart and pushing on her trachea (the windpipe), which led to a buildup of fluid and totally collapsed her left lung. No wonder she couldn't blow out the birthday candles.
They took a two-hour ambulance ride in the middle of the night to Children's Hospital of Philadelphia and went straight into surgery to put in a chest tube and then the intensive care unit, where they spent their first of two weeks in the hospital.
"The craziest thing is like her symptoms were so mild," Kristina said. "Of course, in hindsight, like you see little things like tiredness, which, she's 4. Kids get tired. Night sweats she had. But, again, we just thought she was hot. She always ran hot."