Mooney was devastated by the diagnosis. “I broke down,” she says. Doctors told her that Presten could live a long life, Mooney says, but that he would have to be on the recommended medication for many years, a protocol that upset Mooney. Presten, she told me, “is such a fighter,” and she felt that doctors gave him a prognosis that may not apply to him. “You’re not God,” she told me, referring to his doctors.
A few days after Presten’s diagnosis, Mooney texted her mother, Danya Monroe: “ZERO trust in anything from the FDA, they have contributed to the depopulation of many people for a buck.” “The point of government is control,” she texted the next month. “People have to start thinking about ways to get away from government and becoming self-sufficient, drs aren’t truly healing people, they’re masking peoples problems with endless meds.” And later that day: “The government has made it where people have to depend on what they provide. It’s all by design, but had the country been ran as it was intended, people would be healing with other things, more natural things.”
Presten was at the hospital for days, and Mooney was always by his side. “I’d never leave my child,” she told me. “I needed him to know that it was going to be OK no matter what it was. We were going to get through this. We’ve gone through everything else.” After Presten was discharged, Mooney picked up his prescription, a pill called imatinib, an oral targeted therapy that she was to administer regularly. That winter, she periodically celebrated in a family group chat that Presten’s labs were normalizing. Several months after the diagnosis, though, Presten’s condition began worsening: In late July 2024, his white blood cell count had again risen out of normal range, and his oncologist sought insurance approval to switch him to a medication called dasatinib.
Mooney told me that the doctors couldn’t explain why Presten wasn’t going into remission, just as doctors hadn’t been able to explain why he had epilepsy. She recalls thinking to herself: We’re doing everything you asked us to do. There has to be something else. Mooney took Presten to an appointment in August and then had a September telehealth visit, during which the oncologist told her that the new medication had been approved by insurance. It was the last appointment that Mooney made for her son.
In October 2024, Mooney sent her mother a post on X about a paper summarizing research on ivermectin’s effectiveness against cancer. Her mother remembers Presten telling her that it tasted like “toothpaste made of apples.” Though Mooney often discussed ivermectin with her mother, because she felt “absolutely helpless” when Presten didn’t respond to imatinib, she denies that she ever gave it to her son. In November, when a nurse called to make an appointment, Mooney told the hospital that the family had moved out of state, though they hadn’t. “No med refills needed at this time,” the nurse noted in Presten’s MyChart.