Coralville’s Krysty Bujakowska ‘won three years’ in her cancer battle

CORALVILLE — Like most 13-year-old girls, Krysty Bujakowska had a tight group of friends with inside jokes and TikTok dances and Snap streaks and big plans.

She liked sushi, swimming, pineapples, and Taylor Swift. She had good days and bad days; hopes and dreams; doubts and anxiety; and a lot of questions.

“Like, why do we need that many blankets?” her mom, Kate Bujakowska, said, quoting a 10-year-old Krysty right after she was diagnosed in September 2021 with osteosarcoma — an aggressive form of bone cancer.

“You can actually count how bad you are by the number of blankets in your home happening to appear?” Bujakowska told The Gazette earlier this week. “Suddenly people were coming with blankets, one and another and another.”

A swimmer, actress, chess prowess, and social butterfly who’d rarely been sick since her birth on March 2, 2011, in Wroclaw, Poland, Krysty didn’t make too big a deal of the pain in her leg one evening in 2021.

But she did mention it to her mom.

“And the next day she was like, ‘Oh, no, I don't really feel it’,” Bujakowska said.

The pain returned, though, a few days later, so they went to the doctor.

“At that time, I was thinking that maybe this is just a growing pain,” Bujakowska said.

When the pediatrician couldn’t explain it away or reassure her with a likely cause, Bujakowska asked for a referral to University of Iowa Sports Medicine — because Krysty was about to level up in swimming. They got an appointment the next day — Friday, Sept. 10, 2021 — and Bujakowska picked up her daughter early from school.

“I still wanted to check it out,” she said.

The diagnosis

When they arrived, the sports medicine care team was easygoing and reassuring — assuming it was “probably nothing” but they’d take an X-ray to check.

“The doctor came back and the nurse came back, and they weren't any more cheerful, and they weren’t any more calm and joking,” she said. “And they said that the result was really alarming.”

They said Krysty likely had some kind of sarcoma.

“I was, like, what is sarcoma?” Bujakowska said.

“They were, like, a type of cancer,” she said. “So, you know, immediately I started crying, but at the same time asking them, ‘Hey we want to go to the hospital to figure it out.’ ”

They got in for an MRI on Monday and confirmed it was sarcoma. But doctors at that time also noticed a spot on Krysty’s lungs — which, if cancer, would have meant it had metastasized and spread.

Given the initial treatment was the same, and a biopsy would have been challenging, Krysty jumped right into her first round of chemotherapy by the end of the month.

“She was always super healthy,” Bujakowska said of Krysty — who, as an animal lover, was a dedicated pescatarian and ate lots of fruit and vegetables. “We never had health concerns for her.

“And then you get that information that she has cancer. And life will never be the same,” she said. “And you wake up every day thinking that was a nightmare.”

Through tears and research and pleading with doctors for a reassessment and another consultation and a second opinion, Bujakowska said the new normal sank in.

“You go to sleep, and you cannot sleep very well,” she said. “But then you wake up, and it looks like it’s real.”

‘She was scared’

The family — including Krysty and her two older brothers, Stan and Artur — moved to the United States eight years earlier in 2013 for her dad, Michael Bujakowska’s, job. Krysty started at Coralville Central Elementary and then went to Wickham Elementary when they moved in 2021.

Once news of the diagnosis spread, families and friends and neighbors started bringing her flowers and toys and lots of blankets.

“So she knew that it’s serious,” Bujakowska said. “And I’m sure she was scared.”

But Krysty also was exhausted from so many appointments, discussions, explanations, tests, and procedures that required her to fast.

“You are 10 years old, and you’ve never been really, really hungry before,” her mom said. “And then she couldn't eat. So she has to be strong. And sometimes on those appointments, I was thinking that she was just so tired that she was almost fighting to not fall asleep.

“It was very hard,” she said. “And I was thinking that also was a protection mechanism — that you sometimes just don't want to hear anymore because it's too much for you.”

So Krysty would sleep when she needed and let the adults take care of things.

“She relied on us,” Bujakowska said. “She trusted us. She believed that we made good decisions. But she was part of the decisions, always.”

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Beginning chemo was brutal — given Krysty couldn’t keep food down for days.

“I’m thinking, ‘Oh, my God, how are we going to survive this?’ ” Bujakowska said, noting that while cancer treatment has advanced in many ways, the drug Krysty got was designed 45 years ago “because they don’t have anything newer.”

“They need more research,” she said. “The side effects are also you can destroy your heart, you can destroy your hearing, you can destroy your liver. Your kidneys have a loss of size.”

She had to receive the treatment as an inpatient — spending three days to more than a week at a time, or more if her immune system was entirely wiped out.

“Her first year, she spent over 100 days inpatient and another 100 days outpatient.”

Although Wickham was flexible and no one pushed Krysty to go, she wanted to.

“Sometimes when she was an inpatient, we’d come back home at 9 or 10 in the morning, and by 11 Krysty was ready to go to school,” Bujakowska said. “She was just, ‘I want to go to school, Mom.’ … She changed, took a shower, and said, ‘I want to go to school.’ ”

In the middle of her long first stretch of chemo, Krysty paused the treatment for a surgery to replace her femur with a metal rod that could expand as she grew. But after her first chemotherapy course, scans showed the cancer had spread to Krysty’s lungs — requiring, in the end, five surgeries.

“Every surgery made the prognosis less,” she said. “They were removing part of the lung with every surgery. So you have less and less lung material.”

The family tried different types of chemo — giving her “lifetime” doses requiring she switch to a different type. She did radiation and traveled to places like Cleveland, Toledo, Boston, New York, and eventually Houston for treatments and trials.

“But we just couldn’t get around it,” Bujakowska said.

‘My wildest dreams’

Somehow, in the depths of disease and fear and crippling surgeries stripping her of bones and breath, Krysty managed to live and even thrive — auditioning and being cast in community plays, singing in the assembly for her sixth-grade graduation, trick-or-treating as a giant sloth on Halloween, and even swimming for her seventh grade team at Northwest Middle School — with weakened lungs, filled with cancer.

Through Young Footliters Youth Theatre, Krysty performed in Peter Pan Jr., Frozen Jr. and had the lead role in Jack and the Giant Beanstalk.

“She loved to laugh, and she loved to make others laugh,” Young Footliters Education Supervisor Katie Colletta said. “She was a gifted actor and writer, and she inspired other kids around her to try new things and to believe in themselves.”

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Krysty’s smiley and positive disposition didn’t change after her diagnosis, Lily Barrett, 14, said.

“I think it was my 12th birthday party, and she had just had a procedure a couple of days prior, and we were doing this laser tag party where you had to run around, and we had told her, ‘You do not have to come. You do not have to do all this,’ ” Lily said. “But she came and she participated just as much as anyone else did. And the next day, I guess, she was in so much pain. But she just really wanted to be a part of what we were doing.”

Even when Krysty couldn’t be with her friends, she was texting and FaceTiming them.

“In the summertime, she loved swimming a lot,” Julia Moniza, 13, said.

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Krysty remained an active member of the Ifly swim club and visited 49 states — hiking mountains, camping in state parks, and posing in Times Square. Last year, she served as the UI Kid Captain for the Crossover at Kinnick event and recently in October as an assistant coach for a 2024 Hawkeye Women’s Basketball preseason game.

“One of the absolute best highlights was having (Krysty) by our side,” Hawkeye Women’s Head Coach Jan Jensen shared on Instagram. “She fights with such grace.”

Earlier this month, Krysty went to a Taylor Swift concert in Indianapolis with one of her best friends — executing a carefully crafted outfit and loading up on bracelets and memories in Lucas Oil Stadium.

“My wildest dreams,” she wrote on Instagram.

‘Give her comfort’

At the same time, Krysty was in the midst of another cancer trial — this time in Houston.

“We knew that it was bad, and we had to try something completely new,” her mom said. “She was only the fourth person in the world to try that therapy.”

From her hospital bed in Texas, Krysty did algebra homework, practiced Spanish, and texted friends.

“The first thing she said was, ‘I’m sorry I can’t make it to your birthday party,’ ” Lily said.

Julia said she got to FaceTime Krysty on Nov. 15.

“But it was a little bit hard for her to talk that day because she had on that breathing mask,” she said. “The day after that she was only able to text.”

The new treatment was a form of immunotherapy, and Bujakowska said they were still hopeful.

“Even at the beginning of the week, on Monday, they were thinking, hey, there’s still a chance that she’s gonna get better,” she said. “But then they were, like, it doesn’t look like that.”

As last week progressed, Krysty’s lungs filled with more and more cancer.

On Tuesday, she and Julia texted about when they would be able to FaceTime again.

“Wednesday was a really critical day,” her mom said. “She was feeling very sad, and she had trouble breathing. Every few hours it was changing. It was going very fast.”

Bujakowska said she promised Krysty she wouldn’t be in pain. And with her daughter gasping for air Thursday, she asked the doctors what else can we do? What else can we give her?

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“And they were, like, ‘We just can give her comfort.’ ”

Krysty was having a hard time laying down, her mom said, because that made it harder to breathe. So Bujakowska sat on the bed with her daughter that morning — Nov. 21, 2024 — and put her arms around the small shoulders that had been carrying so much for the past three years.

And she told Krysty, “You’re not doing good. It’s really bad right now. We don’t know if something is going to get better.”

“And she was, like, ‘What do you mean? I’m dying?’ ” her mom said. “She was worried about everyone else. She was, like, ‘What about my friends?’ ”

Krysty spent her last moments thinking about others and the need for more research — even as family surrounded her, hugged her, reminded her “We love her most in the world,” and that she had won.

“Sometimes this cancer takes kids in a matter of a few months,” her mom told her. “You won three years.”

Even then, Krysty fought till the end. She died at 2:55 p.m. But before, even though it was hard for her to talk, she managed a question.

“She asked if in heaven, is she going to have cancer?” Bujakowska said. “And we told her absolutely not. The doctor was there, and she was like, ‘No, you’ll be cancer-free girl.’”

Celebrating Krysty

A funeral Mass for Krysty will be held at 11 a.m., Monday, Dec. 2, at St. Thomas More Catholic Church, 3000 12th Ave. in Coralville.

Visitation will be held at the church Sunday, Dec. 1, from 4 to 7 p.m., with a short vigil service beginning at 4 p.m.

In lieu of flowers, the family is asking people to make a donation to local nonprofit organizations, Young Footliters Youth Theatre or Coralville Community Food Pantry, in the name of Krysty.“

Vanessa Miller covers higher education for The Gazette.

Comments: (319) 339-3158; vanessa.miller@thegazette.com