WHY I RIDE FOR DADS
In January of 2006 my life changed forever when my ten-year-old son, Caleb, was diagnosed with Acute Myelogenous Leukemia. The only thing I knew about leukemia is that it can kill you; the worst fear a parent can have had just smacked me in the face. Caleb was given a 50/50 chance of living through the treatments and becoming cancer free. We were also told that 15% of kids die from the treatments, they are so harsh. What lay ahead for my boy, and my family, seemed like an overwhelming, nearly impossible, and daunting task.
We were right. He spent 161 nights in the hospital over the next six months. He was given copious amounts of chemotherapy, blood, platelets, anti-nausea medications, and medical mumbo jumbo. He spent about eight weeks in the Intensive Care Unit on life support.
One day, after many days and weeks of making no medical progress towards recovery, I was at work and got a personal call from one of the doctors on our oncology team. He was asking how quickly I could come to the hospital for a meeting. I worked about an hour away from the hospital. I made the trip in 45 minutes. It turns out that all four doctors were there to ask us what "heroic measures" we wanted to take on my Caleb.
Let that sink in for a minute; they were asking us to have an end-of-life talk about our ten-year-old son. That is not how life is supposed to work out for families! The terrifying cancer nightmare just got even more real for us. We reminded the doctors that our little boy was only ten and we wanted them to take every heroic measure possible.
They did not argue. On the contrary, what they did was nothing short of heroic. They worked and worked until Caleb fully recovered and was able to be called "cancer free."
They sent us home with a litany of directions, a shoebox filled with medicines, and the hope of a healthy future. We were told that if he could live three years with no more cancer, he would be out of the woods. We cautiously celebrated after year one. We were hope-filled as we celebrated year two. Year three, we threw caution to the wind and released 161 balloons (one for every night in the hospital) and cried tears of gratitude.
He was cancer free!
Twelve days later he went into remission and needed a bone marrow transplant. It felt like a crushing defeat. It was the much worse sequel to the most horrible story we had ever lived through. Caleb began more chemotherapy as we waited, for what seemed like an eternity, to see if there was a bone marrow match for him. He was re-admitted to the hospital on my 50th birthday. Caleb spent over 100 days at Stanford and the Ronald McDonald House in Palo Alto. He went through more chemotherapy, several rounds of full body radiation, a bone marrow transplant, physical therapy, and hospital schooling in lieu of starting his local high school.
Through it all Caleb had been resilient and positive.
Let me fast forward to today. He has residual, chronic medical issues that we live with and remind ourselves are better than the alternative of having lost him. He will graduate from Azusa Pacific University in December and will go on to graduate school to become a middle school English teacher. (Although we question his sanity for wanting to work with middle schoolers, we are glad he has the ability to make the choice for himself.) He is currently nine years post-transplant.
Over the last 12 years we have battled cancer, hopelessness, depression, and cynicism. Right now, we are winning.
We live with hope today and we live cancer free today. We have the freedom to live that way as a result of the many who have gone before us who dared to seek a cure. We live that way because of all of those before us who have funded those research efforts; people like you!
We know we owe our son’s life to those who funded and provided the research that had been done before we needed the help. Along the way we have seen too many families lose those horrifically taxing cancer battles and bury their loved ones. This tells us we need to have better treatments. It is not OK that people die from leukemia or other cancers. It is not OK that the treatments themselves cause other medical issues.
I am not smart enough to cure cancer, but I can ride and raise money to fund those who will find the cure. I believe there will be cures in my lifetime. I believe there can be cures that will not cause other chronic health issues. I believe the money we raise has already made tremendous strides towards a cure.
So, I ride with Ride for Dads and help raise money for the cures we know are coming. I ride in honor of my son, Caleb. I ride as a proud and thankful dad. I also ride in honor of all of those dads who have lost loved ones along this terrible journey.
I ride to help find a cure and to give all cancer families a reason for hope.
-- Steve McNitt | Ride for Dads Team Member and Honoree
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