TAMPA, Fla. — When Powell Middle School 7th grader Aleigha Wilson found out she was diagnosed with fast-progressing leukemia, that meant she had to stop playing basketball — a sport she loved — to focus on her health. 

These days, one would find Aleigha sitting on the stool in front of her vanity in her bedroom doing her makeup.

She loves it. Her routine is simple, but she does it every day.

“ (It's) 'cause I don’t really like my skin, so I usually just do it,” she said.  

She said her skin has been going through a lot these days and it’s been tough. 

“Pretty tough," she said. "Except like November and October. I haven’t really been getting sick from the chemo that I was getting, so it’s kind of been easy, but when they told me I was in remission and then the next day they said I wasn’t, that brought my hopes down. But they said probably after Christmas, I would be in remission, so I probably could go back to school then.”

It’s after Christmas now and she’s not off the hook just yet.

She can easily spend an hour-and-a-half on a chair and may not even go anywhere, but the time she spends on it is everything. 

“It blocks out everything. Like what I’m thinking like it just blocks out everything,” she said.

Aleigha was diagnosed with fast-progressing b-cell acute lymphoblastic leukemia, which is unfortunately common in children. 

“We’ve met so many other people her age now that have the same thing and you see the same treatment, it’s just you see it more and more now that you look.” Wilson's mother, Shawna, said.

She enjoys moments like this, where she gets to watch her daughter slowly get back to one of the things she did all the time before her diagnosis last May. 

“I started to see a decline in the way she felt," Shawna said. "So once that started, it started triggering different things that I didn’t really know how to react to because I didn’t know if it was school related, it was her health or anything like that because it was just different scenarios.”

Once they found out what it was, it was all hands on deck to get Aleigha back to her sports and school.

“Everything is really scary, just the day-to-day. No matter what she does, it doesn’t matter if it’s sports, if it’s walking outside or in a store, you have to protect her, but I would never hold her back if that’s what she wants to do,” Shawna said.

Aleigha still has another round of chemo to go through before she gets the all-clear and the goal is to return back to her normal self by the fall semester —her last year of middle school.