Shannon suffers from a rare type of leukemia known as acute myelogenous leukemia (AML). Early symptoms of the disease—fever, fatigue, paleness, bone and joint pain, and infections—are easy to confuse with more run-of-the-mill illnesses like a cold or the flu. That’s what Shannon’s mother thought.

“I started noticing she was very tired and fatigued, and it wasn’t normal,” Shannon’s mother, Odiney Brown, told ABC News. “The day we found out, we immediately admitted our lives had just changed completely.”

AML can quickly go from bad to worse. In order to recover, Shannon will need a bone marrow transplant, and like so many others with the condition, she now struggles to find a donor. Finding an exact match won’t be easy, either, because Shannon is African American and Hispanic—two highly underrepresented donor groups.

Even in the event that a donor is found, it is likely that Shannon will need additional treatment. “It is generally an aggressive disease that requires chemotherapy,” Shannon’s doctor, Dr. Barbara Asselin of Golisano Children’s Hospital at the University of Rochester Medical Center, told ABC News. “The first hurdle is to see if we can achieve a remission in the bone marrow and don’t see any more leukemia cells.”

Asselin says the chances of recovery are less than other forms of childhood leukemia, but that she remains optimistic about a cure. For now, Shannon is trying to enjoy life as a normal 11-year-old girl, watching movies at home and chatting online with friends between treatments.

Read more from ABC, or find out how to become a donor through the National Marrow Donor Program.