Sloan-Kettering

Sloan-Kettering is the New York cancer center central to Victoria Fusco’s treatment history: it had treated her bone tumor when she was a toddler, and Leimert Fusco later brought her back there when leukemia emerged in her teens. Its role links an earlier apparent cure to the difficult treatment course that followed.

Earlier Treatment

Victoria was treated at Sloan-Kettering for a bone tumor as a toddler and was apparently cured. Years later, after Leimert Fusco’s wife died, Victoria’s cancer returned in a different form: at sixteen, she developed leukemia. The account attributes the later illness apparently to radiation she had received for the earlier tumor, making the center’s place in her history part of a painful sequence in which treatment and subsequent illness were connected.

Return for Care

Leimert Fusco began bringing Victoria from Buffalo to Sloan-Kettering for renewed treatment. She entered remission, relapsed, received more chemotherapy, and achieved only a partial remission. Experimental drugs brought improvement, but she grew weaker. The repeated efforts to control the disease therefore brought no stable recovery: each turn in treatment offered some hope while her physical condition continued to deteriorate.

Planned Transplant and Significance

When Leimert Fusco decided to continue her care closer to home at a hospital in Buffalo, the aim was to build Victoria’s strength enough for her to tolerate a bone-marrow transplant back in New York. Sloan-Kettering remained the intended destination for that next step, even after treatment shifted away from it. Victoria improved for a time, then developed pneumonia after chemotherapy had weakened her immune system and died. The account says her death was not unexpected, but was not inevitable. Sloan-Kettering thus marks both the site of her earlier treatment and the hoped-for return that her declining health ultimately prevented.