E-mail
Print
RSS
G-bookmarks
Live
TechnoratiDoctors thought he might have allergies or migraines. One wanted to put him on antidepressants.
His mom insisted on an MRI.
The radiologist who performed the procedure in March 2006 knew right away what he was looking at.
He showed John's parents the thing in the boy's head, a black spot in the middle of the image of his skull. Joanie thought it looked like a little bomb had exploded in there.
"My mom came out 10 minutes later and gave me a big hug and kiss," John wrote later in a journal he started keeping. "I was stumped. What was wrong? My mom told me I had a tumor then, and that is when my journey with God began."
At first, John felt relieved. At least they knew what was wrong. Now, maybe, the headaches would stop.
Then he started to get scared. His Aunt Debbie, Joanie's older sister, had a brain tumor — and she died.
"Am I going to die?" he asked his mother.
"No," she tried assuring him. "You're not going to die."
But only a few weeks later, doctors at St. Jude Children's Research Hospital in Memphis took John's parents into a room and delivered the unthinkable news: Their son had a malignant tumor on his brain stem that was impossible for surgeons to remove without damaging his brain or killing him.
Odds of survival were long. But John and his family believed he could beat it from the start. He spent six weeks at St. Jude with his mom for radiation and chemotherapy.
He would lie down on a table while a machine swirled around him. He had to wear a mask to keep his head still, which he hated. They even sent him to get the braces off his teeth so it would fit tight on his face.
"When I went in, my mom always told me to imagine God zapping the tumor away," he wrote in his journal. "And you know what, I did. I did every day."
He also jotted down a Bible verse. Hebrews 11:1: "Faith is being sure of what we hope for, and certain of what we do not see."
Before he got sick, John went to church most Sundays with his family but wasn't what you would call religious. He acknowledged that something happened to him when the cancer showed up.
"I learned I needed to change my life," he wrote in the journal. "I learned I needed to live my life through God's eyes and not my own. I learned I had been asking him for so much more than I had been giving him."
John thought about that at St. Jude when he learned that every kid with cancer gets a wish from the Make-A-Wish people.
Back home in Fort Myers, he bugged his mother for months to call Make-A-Wish so he could tell someone about how he wanted to help the kids in Africa. He thought the charity might help him raise money or even send him on a mission trip.
But his parents didn't want to hear about it. The tumor was still there, slowly killing their son, and they were desperate to find some way to stop it.
Calling Make-A-Wish seemed like giving up.
"John, let's worry about you," his mother would say.
Joanie spent hours on the computer researching possible treatments. She called specialists all over the country. She and her son flew to Los Angeles to spend 15 minutes with a top pediatric brain cancer man. She even took John to a faith healer, who grabbed his head, pushed him down and said he was healed.
The tumor was still there, of course, but the radiation and chemo seemed to keep it in check as John started his freshman year at Fort Myers High School.
Then one day in April 2007, a year after the initial diagnosis, John sent a text message from school. Continue »
brianager »
Agree: 
Disagree: 
