The Boy With Cancer Who Ran Away

Great blog post from Tony Jones about the boy the Hodgkin's who refused treatment for "religious reasons." I promise, Melissa nor I have any "religious reasons" for stopping her treatment :)

The original post can be found at:

http://blog.beliefnet.com/tonyjones/2009/05/breaking-news-boy-with-cancer.html

"Breaking News! Boy With Cancer Gets Chemo"

by Tony Jones

Probably the biggest religion story of the past couple weeks has been the saga of Daniel Hauser, the 13-year-old boy from northern Minnesota who is dying of Hodgkin's Lymphoma. Yes, he's dying, unless he gets chemo. With chemo, there's a 90% survival rate. Without chemo, less than 10%.

After one round of chemo this Spring, Hauser refused to go back. At some point he and his mother -- and possibly other members of his family -- "converted" to Nemenhah, an online Native American "religion" that advotes homeopathic recipes of roots and herbs to treat illness. Daniel claimed to be a Nemenhah shaman, then it turned out that Nemenhahites (?) age 13 or older are automatically shamans. The Hausers are in no sense Indian.

When Daniel refused chemo, his doctor took him to court. Daniel defended himself with a first-person statement that I'm highly doubtful that he wrote himself. When the judge ordered Daniel to resume chemo, he and his mother fled to California, seduced by a sleazy lawyer to promptly ditched them. They were then flown back by a Hollywood movie producer, and yesterday, Daniel showed up for chemo at a hospital in Minneapolis.

Lots of people have been writing about this as a freedom of religion case, and it may be.

My friend, Carla, has written about the parental privacy aspects of the situation:

Because raising children is not something we do for ourselves. We raise children to be part of the world, to be active, involved participants in the lives of other people. Daniel Hauser doesn't belong to his mother. He belongs to a family, to a community, to God.

Carla's on to something here. It seems to me that this is a case of a naive and easily manipulated mom, and a bedraggled father, who dragged their son into a hellish public nightmare because of their conspiracy-theory mistrust of Western medicine.

This is why we live in a society, surrounded by other human beings, so that when one of us loses our way, there's a whole posse of people around to ensure that we don't take others down with us. Thank GOD for a sensible physician and judge for overriding in unsensible parent.

Power Ports and Power Rangers

Today the treatment adventure more or less began. We arrived at the outpatient radiology unit at Scottsdale Healthcare Shea Campus at 9 a.m. to have Melissa's port installed into her chest. We checked in and tied up a few loose ends with the very nice billing girl. Melissa and I then went back to the lab so Melissa could have some blood drawn. After that we went back to the "Holding Room" where Melissa put on a hospital gown, jumped into a bed and was hooked up to an IV. A nurse then walked us through the procedure and let us check out a sample port (pictured above). The port makes it so each time Melissa needs blood drawn or needs chemotherapy or a dye injected for a scan, they don't have stick a needle in her arm.

After the blood work came back clear the doctor met with us and then it was time for Melissa to be wheeled back, get drugged up, then have the procedure. At this point they kicked me out of the room and invited me to grab something in the cafeteria. By cafeteria I figured they meant I should run across the street to the Red Robin. I'm not one to argue with medical professionals so I complied.

The procedure only lasted about an hour and when I returned Melissa was back in the "Holding Room" eating a turkey sandwich and drinking a Diet Coke. The only difference was that now she had a piece of titanium just under the skin of the upper right hand side of her chest with a small catheter running under the skin to her jugular vain. She also has two really small but cool incisions that have been glued shut. She won't be lifting anything using her right arm for the next two weeks until the incisions are completely healed. The port, however, is ready for use and will get taken for a spin on Tuesday when she receives her first round of chemotherapy. Apparently between the painkillers and sedatives they gave Melissa before the surgery, she was supposed to fall asleep. By the end of the surgery (and a Dancing With the Stars discussion) the doctor told Melissa, "That's funny, you should have fallen asleep at some point, oh well, we're all done!"

We only had to wait in recovery for about an hour and then Melissa was discharged and was able to walk out under her own power. We were even able to stop at Target on the way home to pick up some odds and ends. Melissa was pretty tired though when we got home and she took a nap for a few hours before we ordered some pizza and watched Grey's Anatomy with some of my Wesley students.

The joke now is that Melissa is a purple Power Ranger because she has a purple power port and she's a superhero. But we already knew that :)

As always, we need to thank everyone who have offered prayers, support and get well wishes. Today we would especially like to thank Craig who watched Colby and the ladies from Tempe First UMC who made Melissa a pink "Love Knots" blanket. She will definitely be using it on Tuesday.

For more info on ports:

http://www.bardaccess.com/port-powerport.php

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Port_(medical)