Although a structured education has been difficult for one St. Vrain Valley student, she and her family have felt the support of SVVSD’s APEX Homeschool Program.
On March 2, teachers from St. Vrain Valley School District’s APEX Homeschool Program formed hearts with their hands while posing for a picture they posted on the program’s Twitter page along with the message, “Your APEX family is with you today Tate, on transplant day, cheering you on, sharing our love and silliness and waiting with open arms for you to be here again!”
At the time of the Tweet, former APEX student Tatum Spiegelberg was in the ICU at Denver Children’s Hospital waiting to undergo a bone marrow transplant.
Tatum grew up in good health for the first eight years of her life, according to her mother, Jamie Spiegelberg, but began facing sudden and inexplicable medical issues as a third-grader in the fall of 2014.
At first, Tatum’s medical issues appeared as chronic fevers, extreme fatigue and humongous oral ulcers, Jamie Spiegelberg said. Just months after her health’s initial decline, Tatum had run-ins with mononucleosis, gnomonia and strep throat, and she began contracting frequent ear and urinary tract infections, her mother described.
Tatum’s parents and teachers grew worried that fall as Tatum became incapable of getting through a school day without spiking a fever or falling asleep in class. However, the worst was yet to come when, in the beginning of 2015, Tatum’s unknown disease began attacking her brain.
“By January of 2015, Tatum had lost her ability to write, she couldn’t identify numbers … She went from being in highly academic classes to losing a lot of her basic skills,” Jamie Spiegelberg explained. “Her personality also changed and she went from being this extremely bubbly, outgoing social butterfly to being terrified of everything — she couldn’t handle sounds or touch and she had separation anxiety. It was awful and we swam in that world for quite a while.”
While initial medical tests led doctors to diagnose Tatum with Lupus, the normal pediatric treatment for Lupus proved unsuccessful for eight-year-old Tatum, Spiegelberg explained.
Although doctors had begun what would become a long journey towards diagnosing Tatum’s various and overwhelming health issues, the majority of answers wouldn’t come until many years later. As a result, Tatum was forced to navigate normal life to the best of her ability for the next couple of years, Spiegelberg said.
On days when Tatum didn’t find herself in a hospital bed, she attended a public elementary school where, she and her parents found, her attempts to keep up with her peers fell short.
Tatum required a lot of breaks for napping during extracurricular activities and felt sick most of the time, Jamie Spiegelberg said.
Navigating a social life also turned out to be tricky for Tatum during these years. She didn’t have enough energy to maintain friendships. Also, her peers struggled to understand her illness, creating further barriers.
“People are afraid of what they don’t understand and so that was really very isolating when Tatum was at the local charter school,” Jaime Spiegelberg said. “The staff was wonderful but the parents and kids just didn’t understand what was happening with her … So Tatum stopped getting invited to birthday parties and things like that, and she went from being the center of it all to being on the outskirts.”
Despite her and her family’s feelings of discouragement about Tatum’s education, Tatum found a community that accepted her at the APEX Homeschool Program.
In the fall of 2017, Tatum started sixth grade at APEX and thrived both academically and socially. While Tatum’s academic success came from APEX’s homeschool hybrid model – the program allows students flexibility to attend in person classes once a week and then study independently at home the other four days – the most important thing it gave Tatum was a loving, supportive community, according to Jamie Spiegelberg.
“The staff at APEX are the kindest, most understanding people,” Jamie Spiegelberg said. “These are teachers who worked in the more traditional public school system and wanted something different. They have just been so incredibly loving and supportive towards our family.”
“Tatum is the epitome of joy,” said Kim Lancaster, principal of the APEX program. “Watching her suffer and hurt has broken all our hearts. Tatum represents the hope we have for all our students to live a full, meaningful, vibrant life, flourishing in their gifts and talents. We will always stand with Tatum and her family and be here to cheer them on every step of the way. Tatum is a part of our world whether she's in the hospital or here in our school building.”
Increasing health concerns prevented Tatum from returning to APEX for her freshman year, an experience Tatum looked forward to.
In desperate attempts to decipher and treat the various health conditions that encumber Tatum, her doctors performed more specialized tests. By July 2021, they discovered that, in addition to Lupus, Tatum battles Behçet’s — a rare inflammatory disorder — as well as Mosaic Trisomy 8 — a rare chromosomal disorder.
Although Tatum’s doctors at Denver Children’s Hospital had uncovered her diagnoses, they informed the Spiegelberg family that they had never seen a case in which someone presented Lupus, Behçet’s and Mosaic Trisomy 8 at the same time.
As a result, “(the doctors) were stumped,” Jamie Spiegelberg said, “and, at that point, they were like ‘we’re just going to watch and wait.’”
Fearing Tatum’s chances of survival and feeling unsatisfied with her doctors’ lack of action, Jamie Spiegelberg decided to search for answers by seeking someone with a similar medical background as Tatum. She found what she was looking for on the Seattle Children’s Hospital website — the success story of a 28-year-old man’s medical journey whose background “sounded eerily similar to Tatum’s,” Jamie Spiegelberg said.
Jamie Spiegelberg reached out to the team of doctors and requested their help on Tatum’s case. Doctors from Seattle and Denver collaborated about the best course of treatment for Tatum.
Finally, a consensus was reached and they decided the best path for Tatum would be for her to undergo a bone marrow transplant.
The plan hasn’t gone as anticipated and Tatum has been in a lot of pain since the first day of the transplant process, according to Jamie Spiegelberg. In efforts to combat her pain, Tatum has been more or less sedated, although even the sedation is not going very well, Jamie Spiegelberg added.
As a result, “Tatum is kind of struggling right now,” Jamie Spiegelberg said on Sunday, the 11th day of the transplant process.
Tatum’s 15th birthday came and passed while Tatum remained in the ICU. She wasn’t lucid enough to have any kind of celebration, according to an updated post on the Tate’s Tribe Facebook — the family’s way of communicating Tatum’s progress to friends and family.
Despite the hardships of Tatum’s medical journey, the Spiegelberg family remains thankful that Tatum was able to undergo the transplant.
“Tatum’s story is really remarkable, but what’s most remarkable about it is that we feel like God put the right people in the right place at the right moments to help us,” Jamie Spiegelberg said. “He knew the right people to ask the right questions and people just kept saying ‘yes’ and that was huge because, without this transplant, Tatum would not survive. It was the only option.”
