Crest High School graduate Braylee Burnett has grand dreams.
The 17-year-old plans to follow her parents’ footsteps into the medical field.
Her father, Michael, is the Emergency Medical Services director for Allen County. Mother Amy is a certified nursing assistant.
Braylee will enroll at Allen Community College in the fall to begin her postsecondary schooling.
She does so while dealing with multiple sclerosis, a diagnosis she received midway through her sophomore year at CHS.
The disease, in which the body’s immune system mistakenly produces antibodies that attacks a person’s central nervous system, is something she’ll have to deal with for the rest of her life. There’s no known cure.
The disease had progressed so far that simple medication is not sufficient for treatment.
Instead, Burnett must receive periodic OCREVUS infusions, usually every six months, to keep the wayward antibodies in check.
But the treatment schedule has been thrown into a lurch after the Burnetts learned their insurance company — Blue Cross and Blue Shield of Kansas — has denied her neurologist’s last infusion request.
Time is of the essence.
Recent lab work has indicated her B cell count — a type of white blood cell that typically is a vital component of a person’s immune system, but is worrisome for MS patients — has begun to spike.
Worse still, Braylee has begun noticing sensation changes in her arm — “It’s almost like if your arm falls asleep,” her mother noted.
“The general rule of thumb is that if there are any sensation changes that last more than 24 hours, we’re supposed to reach out to our neurologist immediately,” Amy Burnett explained.
Braylee has undergone lab tests twice in the past month.
The first test, done in mid-May showed her B cell count at zero, the ideal number in cases of multiple sclerosis.
But a more recent test last Thursday showed her B cell count at 66 — the highest they’d been since her diagnosis in February 2023.
