Codie Mendez is a superhero to her four kids, and she had the hardware to prove it.
When her children first noticed the port in her chest that would pump chemotherapy into her as she fought acute lymphocytic leukemia, also known as ALL, she assured them that the contraption was her own “arc reactor” like the one that kept Iron Man alive.
“After they heard that, they said, ‘Mom, can we touch it?’ I told them that I was going to the hospital but that I’m coming back strong — super strong. They loved that idea and thought it was awesome.”
Tony Stark, aka Iron Man from Marvel comic book and movie fame, could take a few lessons in grit from Codie Mendez.
Diagnosed with acute lymphocytic leukemia in July 2020, Codie had just turned 27. She was a busy mom raising three boys under 6, and nursing her fourth child, a daughter who was 1. She and her husband Mark had arrived in Firestone, Colorado, only a few weeks earlier as the Covid-19 pandemic was changing everything, and their house was crammed with unopened boxes.
“We just moved cross country. I’m unpacking, and my shoulder started hurting. That’s when it all began,” Codie said.
That night as she massaged what she thought was a pulled muscled in her right shoulder, she felt a pea-sized bump that moved toward her neck. As the hours passed, she could “almost feel it growing.” Alarmed, she woke up her husband. They agreed to go to urgent care in the morning.
By then, the lump had swollen to the size of a plum and was pressing against her throat, and she was having trouble breathing and swallowing. Within 24 hours, she’d had an ultrasound, a CT scan and had made a trip to UCHealth Longs Peak Medical Center in Longmont, where she was told she would need to see an oncologist and undergo biopsies.
“I’m thinking, what? An oncologist?”
Always a competitor, she faced cancer with four young children
Born and raised in southern California, Codie was a cross-country high school standout whose athletic prowess earned her a scholarship to Denver’s Metro State in 2011. A year or so later, she met her future husband Mark, a Colorado native, and they moved to Wisconsin and Florida before returning to the Denver area and buying a home, sight unseen, in Firestone in summer 2020.
“When I first met Codie, she was in the prime of her collegiate athletic career,” Mark said. “I hadn’t crossed paths with a cross country and track and field runner. Living by her side as she got up at 5 a.m. every day for training and the hundreds of miles she was running on a monthly basis, was enough to inspire anyone to work hard. I knew since then, we were in it together, and I could always trust her to give our family strength.”
The family of six includes sons Psalm, born in 2014, with Luka coming a year later and Sullivan, arriving in 2017. Daughter Annakin was born in 2019.
A few days after her trip to Longs Peak Hospital, Codie was outside with the boys playing when she received a call with tough news. She had acute lymphocytic leukemia — a word Codie could barely pronounce when she tried to tell her husband minutes later. She would need to be seen by a cancer specialist to start immediate treatment.
“Acute” means the cancer can progress quickly, while lymphocytic leukemia is a type of cancer of the blood and bone marrow affecting white blood cells.
“I just broke down. My oldest son ran to my husband and told him, ‘Momma’s crying. Momma’s crying.’ A half hour later, she was told she’d need to begin 30 days of consecutive chemo treatment right away.
“Running through my mind is, who’s going to take care of my kids? I home school them. My husband has a job. I’m a stay-at-home mom. I’m still breast feeding. How is this going to work?”
Trying to process it all was crushing. But Codie tried to take away some positives. One of the reasons she and Mark returned to Colorado was to be close to his family.
His mother stepped up to watch the kids during Codie’s first round of chemo, and her husband would make the long drive every day to the Anschutz Medical Campus in Aurora to ensure Codie had company during her treatments.
But there was something she needed to do first, a painful but necessary task.
“I cut all my hair off. That was really hard for me. As an African American woman, your hair is everything. Growing up I was extremely insecure, as your hair was something other kids would make fun of. By now, I had a beautiful afro, but I realized I didn’t want it falling out during chemo. I wanted to take control of this.”
She went to a local barber where the stylist went to work, shaving a cool design into her scalp, giving her a hug and refusing any money.
“My husband told me I looked beautiful, but my kids kept asking why I did it. They really struggled with it.”
Tough treatment for a tough mom
Codie spent all of August at UCHealth University of Colorado Hospital where she received chemo six days a week for four weeks. Visitors under age 12 weren’t allowed on the floor to protect vulnerable patients, so she pleaded with her care team to let her go outside each week so she could see her children.
Not only was she missing her kids, but Codie had other reasons to grieve. She had lost her hair, she was enduring chemo, she had to miss her son Sullivan’s 3rd birthday and she had to give up breastfeeding her infant daughter.
“They had to bring a pump from the maternity floor, and I had to pump and dump the milk in the sink since it couldn’t be used because of the chemo chemicals. I felt that was like pouring liquid gold down the drain,” she said.
And there was another loss she had to contend with. August 2020 marked the one-year anniversary of the death of her older brother, Andre Maurice Moye Jr., a California Highway Patrol officer who was killed in the line of duty. Along with her older sister, Lissette Solorio, Codie released balloons in the skies above the hospital in his memory.
“It was really hard on my family because our oldest brother had passed away and now the youngest daughter was going through cancer.”
Codie was allowed to go home for a few weeks in September but had to face several more chemo rounds that would last through the end of the year.
She had time to enroll the kids in school before she began a second round of tough, five-hour chemo treatments for another month. After a short break, she had to submit to a third round with a similar grueling schedule.
“Undergoing the chemo was a full-time job. My immune system was weak, and I would drive myself to and from Anschutz, which was a 45-minute drive each way. The kids were in school and there was COVID, and they’d come home, and we’d be anxious. We had them change their clothes and wash their hands, but there was only so much you could do.”
A stem cell transplant is Codie’s best bet to beat cancer
After all of her treatments in 2020, Codie thought she was in remission, but in January 2021, oncologists informed her that the chemo hadn’t been enough, and tests showed cancer cells remained. They wanted her to undergo a stem cell — or bone marrow — transplant, during which her bone marrow would be replaced with healthy cells from donor blood.
The reason? Unfortunately, Codie had a rarer and more aggressive type of ALL, called Early T-cell Precursor ALL, in which the rate of relapse is higher. There are no novel immunotherapy treatments for this type of cancer, with oncologists relying on chemo and stem cell transplants to help patients, said Dr. Marc Schwartz who specializes in hematology and oncology at the UCHealth Bone Marrow Transplant Clinic on the Anschutz Medical Campus.
He has been part of Codie’s care team from the beginning.
“Our goal is to get patients into long-term remission and have the disease never come back,” said Schwartz, who is also an assistant professor of medicine-hematology at the University of Colorado School of Medicine.
Schwartz said UCHealth is unique in that many of these transplants use umbilical cord blood as the donor source, typically leading to better outcomes for patients.
“There is a unique aspect of cord blood that we think leads to better control of the disease without increased risk of long-term immunologic toxicity, in comparison to other donor sources,” he said.
During a stem cell transplant procedure, stem cells from a compatible healthy adult are combined with stem cells from a unit of umbilical cord blood. In Codie’s case, her mother was the adult donor.
Once transplanted into the patient, the healthy donor cells recognize leukemia cells as foreign and eradicate them.
During the procedure Codie had to stay in the hospital from mid-February to mid-March, 2021. She had more chemo and radiation therapy treatments prior to the procedure and spent several weeks recovering after to ensure her body accepted the stem cells without attacking them.
For part of her recovery, she stayed in an apartment near Anschutz for about a month, and her sister Lissette quit her job to take care of her.
“She didn’t like me very much because I was very strict about everything,’’ laughed Lissette, whose fiancé is Mark’s brother. “I made her take her meds and took her back to the hospital when she got an infection.
“I always told her, just get this done. You have a husband and children who need you. When she was extremely sick, going through dark times and wanting to give up, I tried my hardest to remind her, look at your babies…they need you. I think those kids and Mark really encouraged her to stay strong through it, and I was just there to remind her of that.”
Martial arts helped give her hope and rebuild her confidence
After returning home after the transplant in spring 2021, Codie experienced health setbacks.
She came down with Graft-Versus-Host-Disease, a complication that occurs when donated cells attack a patient’s healthy cells. Steroids, which were part of her recovery treatment, ballooned her weight to 210, before she lost 100 pounds and more.
Two years later, “normal” is a word she doesn’t like to use, though she’s as close to it now than she’s been in a while.
“She’s in long-term remission,” Schwartz said. “She had no detectable signs of leukemia since the transplant and is doing great. I fully expect for her to stay in remission, and I’m so happy to see her back with her family. It’s wonderful to know she’s doing so well.”
Though Codie sometimes struggles with fatigue and low energy, she has reached a Zen state of mind with the love of her family, gratitude for her husband whom she thanks every day for his support, and the intense rigor of mastering Muay Thai, or Thai Boxing, which she practices five times a week.
Codie was drawn to the sport after wanting to get stronger and climb back in the driver seat when it came to her health. The aggressive version of martial arts where participants act first instead of being on the defensive is befitting to Codie’s personality.
“She’s a stronger person now for sure,” Lissette said. “She’s a total bad ass. She’s always been balls out about everything she does, and the mindfulness and discipline behind this sport helps her.”
The next belt Codie earns will be an advanced one, and last year she placed second place in the sparring category during a local Muay Thai tournament.
“I love this, it’s great. It’s my jam,” she said.
Her husband has seen her through the struggles and said he couldn’t be prouder.
“She could have given up, and we wouldn’t have held it against her. But she didn’t, she made it through her trials, just for us. Codie’s perseverance sets an example for anyone going through difficult times, and although it feels like we’ve climbed mountain after mountain, I’ll always tie up my hiking boots just to have the experience of hitting the trail with her one more time.
“She’s inspired me constantly over the 11 years I’ve known her. I love her, and our whole family loves her. And we always will.”
Codie has her sights on buying a house with a few acres. She would love to become a small-time farmer with a few animals (in addition to the three dogs Mark acquired while she recuperated), a big garden for flowers and vegetables, and a large yard for the kids to play.
“Being diagnosed with cancer has changed me so much as a person. I’ll never be the same and I’ll never feel the same. But it’s also allowed me to heal a lot. I was very angry with stuff that happened in my childhood, but now I’ve forgiven and tried to move on. I’m just honestly a nicer person.”
That self-growth includes knowing she can’t protect her children from the truth about her medical issues even though she’d like to.
For instance, last fall she fainted while doing the dishes, dislocating her shoulder. Annakin tried to “wake” her up, even performing CPR. But when she continued to be unresponsive, she found her mom’s cell phone and called her dad saying, “Momma is hurt and she needs help,” Codie recalled.
“They know their mommy might be a little bit sick, but they also know their mommy is strong.”
Like a superhero.