TULALIP — After an evening of masks, auctions, music and dining, it all came down to nine small children, only one of whom survived.

Alexandra Craft was the survivor, and she served as the featured guest speaker for the American Cancer Society’s fifth annual Night of Hope Gala at the Tulalip Report Casino Sept. 13.

Craft was diagnosed with Acute Lymphoblastic Leukemia (ALL) on Sept. 10, 1991, when she was only 2 1/2.

Doctors told her family that her bone marrow was already 98 percent impacted with cancer, even though he guessed the cancer had only developed the week before.

Craft’s condition was so severe that her family’s insurance initially refused to cover treatment, since she wasn’t expected to live much longer than 24 hours.

“In order to afford it, my parents were told that either they could go on welfare, or my grandparents would have to adopt me, so that I’d be covered by Social Security,” said Craft, now 25 and a graduate of the University of Alaska. “My parents and grandparents had to hold me down, because I was screaming as my bone marrow was drawn. It made my mom pass out.”

Thanks to what Craft deemed a precursor of the patient navigator program, her family learned of clinical trials being offered through the ACS, but even then, the project survival level of ALL patients was 4 percent. Craft was one of nine children to go through those trials, and three years later, she was the only one left alive.

“As a cancer survivor, you wind up with PTSD,” Craft said. “Even now, with every little bruise I get, I instinctively think, ‘Oh, no, it’s cancer again.'”

Craft recalled the 17 pills she had to take every day, which her mother turned into a game to make it easier.

“As a child, I was too young to understand what was happening to me,” Craft said. “As an adult, I’m sorry to those eight other children for every day I’ve taken for granted.”

Craft reported that, thanks to ACS trials such as hers, 90 percent of patients diagnosed with ALL now survive.

“When I applied to college at seventeen, I was asked to write an essay on the person who’d influenced me the most,” Craft said. “That’s all the people in this room, right now, because every dollar that’s gone toward funding cancer research has helped save lives, including mine.

“Because of the American Cancer Society, I’ve gone from twenty-four hours to twenty-five years,” she added. “In the twenty-three birthdays I’ve had since then, I’ve had experiences most people can only dream of, and that’s because of you. Not all of us can be doctors, but all of us can give something, and what you gave me was a chance to live.”