Jessica Smither thought her blurred vision was just allergies. Instead, an eye exam led to a diagnosis so dire that doctors at a Houston hospital told the 40-year-old she had only weeks to live. What they had actually found, it turned out, was a rare and treatable combination of two blood cancers that a Houston medical center's specialists would later untangle and cure.
Smither's ordeal began in fall 2022 when her vision suddenly turned severely blurry, despite having had LASIK surgery two years earlier, according to the Houston Chronicle. An optometrist referred her to another eye specialist, who discovered blood pooling behind her left eye and told her to go to a hospital immediately. Doctors determined she had suffered a stroke in her left eye and diagnosed her with chronic myeloid leukemia, the Chronicle reported.
Retinal hemorrhages and sudden vision changes show up in roughly 42% to 50% of leukemia patients, according to Review of Optometry, with leukemic retinopathy often serving as the first sign of an underlying blood cancer. Those ocular changes stem from anemia, low platelets, and hyperviscosity in the blood, the outlet notes. Smither began taking oral chemotherapy pills to manage the CML and continued on that medication for another two years, per the Chronicle's reporting.
A Terminal Prognosis at the First Hospital
Everything changed in January 2023, when Smither was admitted to a Houston hospital and told her CML had progressed to blast phase. The station's original report states doctors said she had only weeks left to live and that a stem cell transplant was her only hope of survival. She lost nearly 80 pounds in about six weeks as her condition deteriorated.
What the first hospital's doctors had actually found, unbeknownst to them, was a case where they mistook acute myeloid leukemia for CML in blast phase. Standard bone marrow biopsies can misidentify AML as CML blast crisis because both conditions present with high blast cell counts on morphology alone, according to Frontiers in Oncology. Distinguishing the two requires advanced cytogenetic testing and FISH analysis, since CML blast phase carries a dismal prognosis while certain forms of AML respond well to intensive chemotherapy.
Smither was transferred to the University of Texas MD Anderson Cancer Center in February 2023, arriving with a prognosis that suggested she had little time left. She had blood tests three times a week as her new medical team worked to figure out exactly what was happening inside her body.
A Second Opinion Changes the Diagnosis
At MD Anderson, doctors performed a bone marrow biopsy and Dr. Tapan Kadia examined Smither's cancer under a microscope himself. What he found upended the earlier assessment entirely: Smither had chronic myeloid leukemia and acute myeloid leukemia simultaneously, a combination that medical research on PubMed describes as an extremely rare diagnostic event, since the two cancers usually originate from distinct cell lineages and rarely appear together without prior chemotherapy exposure.
Kadia identified an inversion 16 chromosomal abnormality in her AML, a marker the National Cancer Institute says occurs in roughly 5% of AML patients and carries a favorable prognosis. Because the inv(16) abnormality involves a fusion gene that makes leukemia cells exceptionally sensitive to targeted chemotherapy, complete remission rates run above 85% and 5-year survival rates as high as 75% are achievable with high-dose cytarabine regimens, according to the National Cancer Institute. Kadia told Smither her leukemia was very curable, according to the Chronicle's reporting, a stark reversal from the terminal prognosis she had received weeks earlier.
Smither's age also worked in her favor. National Cancer Institute SEER data cited by Patient Power shows 5-year relative survival for AML reaching nearly 66% for patients diagnosed under 40, compared with under 10% for adults over 75. AML is predominantly a disease of older adults, with a median diagnosis age of 68, making Smither's case doubly unusual.
Treatment, Marriage and Remission
Kadia treated Smither's CML with oral chemotherapy pills while recommending specialized drugs and IV chemotherapy for the AML. She underwent six cycles of intensive IV chemotherapy over six months, a regimen consistent with clinical trial findings published on PubMed showing that repetitive cycles of high-dose cytarabine consolidation chemotherapy lower the chance of relapse in inv(16) AML patients compared with single-cycle treatment. She was also treated with antivirals and antibiotics, and at one point experienced jaundice after reacting badly to chemotherapy, the Chronicle reported.
Amid the grueling treatment, Smither married her husband, Victor Raimbault, in the hospital. Raimbault told the Chronicle the couple made a point to communicate and act as a team throughout the ordeal. He also said patients should advocate for themselves because doctors can make mistakes, a lesson drawn directly from what happened at the first hospital.
Smither is now in remission from both types of leukemia and continues taking medication to manage her health. She and Raimbault traveled to France together in early 2024. She earned a computer science degree during the COVID-19 pandemic and is now applying for computer science jobs, according to the Chronicle. She said she needed a doctor who would tell her how to survive, not simply how much time she had left.
Why the Second Opinion Mattered
Smither's case illustrates why specialists caution against rushing into irreversible treatments, like stem cell transplants, before comprehensive testing is complete. A landmark study published in Blood and highlighted by the American Society of Hematology found that briefly delaying chemotherapy in clinically stable AML patients to await full cytogenetic and genetic results does not worsen overall survival, and instead enables more precisely targeted therapy. Historical practice had favored immediate emergency chemotherapy within 24 hours of detecting blast cells, an approach that leaves less room to catch cases like Smither's.
Leukemia also carries one of the highest rates of emergency-setting diagnosis among all cancers, with approximately 37% of patients diagnosed in emergency rooms because of how rapidly symptoms can escalate, according to Leukaemia UK. Earlier diagnosis before complications set in tends to improve how well patients tolerate treatment, the organization notes.
MD Anderson, where Smither's diagnosis was ultimately corrected, was ranked No. 1 in the nation for cancer care in U.S. News & World Report's 2026–2027 Best Hospitals survey, marking its 12th consecutive year atop the rankings. The Houston institution has also been expanding its physical footprint, having approved a $2.9 billion campus expansion in May 2026 to build a 25-floor inpatient tower in the $2.9B cancer tower plan within the Texas Medical Center, the largest medical complex in the world.
