Made By A Person Who Longed To See A Swan

This week has been a week of lasts.  Sometime this evening will be Jayne's last chemo injection.  It is both an immense relief and a subtle weight that is being placed upon us.  Obviously, everyone involved with our little boy will be ecstatic that he won't have to endure any of the further indignities and limitations that go along with chemotherapy.  I understand, as should we all, that this is but one step towards the end of the journey that has been the last few months.  It is not the definitive end and it isn't even the end of our days in the hospital, we expect at least 30 or so more days while his counts drop and then recover enough so that we can have his broviac removed.  But it definitely is very symbolic, this being his last application of chemo and it gives my wife and me the opportunity to actually begin looking forward to our life, interrupted.  We can see his first steps taking place somewhere other than a hospital hallway, we can hear his first word while he isn't hooked to an IV stand, we get to watch him grow up into the man that he is knowing that we jumped this massive hurdle once and that we have nothing to worry over in the future.

The weight that goes along with this, however, will never truly leave any of our shoulders.  Sadly, even Jayne must someday come to terms with the fact that he had cancer when he was a baby and there is a chance, minuscule though it may be, that he could wind up back in the hospital enduring more rounds of chemotherapy, hair loss, confinement, and isolation.  It's a difficult prospect as a parent, to know that one day you will have to sit down and explain this concept.  It will certainly take an effort of will from Jayne, with unending support from Shay and I, for him to come to terms with such a mind-boggling concept.  On that day, if everything works out the way it should (and given our track record, why wouldn't it?), I will show him this blog, I'll show him the archive of the gofundme donations, the letters, the heartfelt messages, and anything else that we have at our fingertips to show him that he didn't do this alone the first time and he will never have to.  While the medical portion of cancer treatment and recovery is solely between an individual's body and the medicine applied, there are components which have nothing to do with chemo or medicine.  The emotional side, the psychological aspect of confronting something so monstrous and intangible as cancer, can be devastating.  It will be our job, his family, his friends, he supporters, to keep his spirits up, to cheer him along the way, and be there for him.  Hopefully, after that is complete, we will never need to employ such a massive assault upon the gloom of the sick, and he will live all his days never remembering being hooked up to an IV stand for the better part of 5 months.

To shift gears a bit, something spectacular happened on Sunday: Jayne got to meet one of his heroes, Justin Gaethje.  Or, perhaps it was the other way around.  Justin was in Safford last weekend and called us to ask if he could come visit.  I think that he was apprehensive, since we had just been readmitted into the hospital on Friday, but his ANC was high and he was still in good spirits, so we told him to head down.  It was... touching to see the two of them together.  This man, who makes a living out of being a badass, spent the time blowing raspberries, playing peek-a-boo, and doing just about anything that he could to make our son laugh and smile.  For those of you who have had the pleasure of meeting Jayne in person, he can be a bit reserved at first, and he was when Justin first came in (though he didn't really take issue with flirting with his mom and sister quite readily).  But Jayne, being a good judge of character, had a good time showing Justin his one tooth, how he could walk, how he could sing and yell (the two are not mutually exclusive in his case), and just how big he really is (so big!).  It was a very satisfying moment, both as a parent and a human being, to watch the two of them interact.  Justin, who had never met either of us, had taken upon himself to help this sick boy who was inexorably chained to circumstances that were nowhere within his understanding or his control.  He helped set up an auction for Jayne, even managing several other items from his organization to join the things that Justin had donated.  The money from that auction, like everything else that has been proffered and donated since his diagnosis, immensely helped Shay and I get through this difficult time.  After seeing the very genuine smile that Justin sported after meeting Jayne, I sincerely wish that we could meet with each and every person who gave us aid in this very dour time in our life.  I know that we can never truly repay any of you for the kindness that you've shown us, and to attempt to do so would be insulting, but just one smile from that little boy is enough to make it seem like everything is fantastic.

So, thank you Justin, thank you everyone, for supporting us as we hobble our way along to the nearest pit stop.  Everything that you have done for us is not forgotten and is greatly appreciated.  We've had the tireless support of nurses and the doctors at PCH, as well, creating a perfect storm that managed to create a scaffolding around what seemed to be a collapsing bundle of sticks.  I won't forget, ever, the first night that we were in the hospital, officially, that is. When we found out that it was cancer, though that was really the only thing that they were sure of at the time.  I didn't sleep, I spent most of the night just staring at Jayne, the IV sticking out of his arm, the crib with it's innocuous and, simultaneously sinister, bars casting no shadows in the light directly overhead.  I just watched his little chest move up and down with every breath, his arm twitching ever so often as it adjusted to the new weight of the tube jutting from it.  He had no idea what he was about to endure and, truth be told, neither did I.  There was no way that I could make what Shay and I, married less than a year, jibe with reality.  And, as I watched my son, the most important thing I'd ever done in the world, sleep peacefully and soundlessly, I told myself that I would do whatever it took to get us through this.  And we have gotten there.  We got there together, all of us, everyone who has been hanging on every word, trying to find out just what Jayne's status is, what his condition is like, what his future will be.  We all got here, with the end in sight.  It hasn't been the easiest of journeys, nor do I think that it will be the last, but cleared this hurdle with the might of science, medicine, love, and friendship.

Thank you.

And If We're Very Very Lucky, They'll Do It In That Order

The home stretch lies before us. 

Within a month or so, the hardest part will be past.  His MRDs have all come back at 0%, there doesn't seem to be any evidence of leukemia left in his body.  This last round of chemo will ensure that that remains to be true.  Then his, when his numbers recover, his broviac will come out and we'll be free from the hospital.  After that our small Wood clan will be able to, finally, move on with their lives in something resembling normality.

This round of chemo, the big bad knockout punch for any cancer cells still lurking in his body, will last 6 days.  That's surprising for us, considering we thought it was going to be lasting 14 days.  Whether by a misunderstanding on our part or the fact that there is no traceable evidence of any cancer in his marrow, this truncation is quite welcome indeed.  This doesn't mean that Jayne will be right as rain in less time.  Because of the nature of the last three chemo treatments he will be receiving it is very likely that this round may take quite a while for him to recover.  We're expecting, on the outside, to be here for 40 days.  That still gets us out of the hospital well before August begins, meaning that our son won't even have to worry about spending his first birthday with tubes sticking out of his chest.  

For more than half his life, up to this point, he has been in and out of the hospital, enduring treatments and tests in an effort to ensure that he will not have to do this when he's 5 or 8 or 16 or 21.  Jayne's never been in a pool, though now we've been living 50 yards from one for the last few months.  He hasn't had a real bath with real, boisterous splashing that turns the bathroom into a water park.  He's had to spend most of his time learning to crawl, and then walk, with a tall, slender and imposing chaperon, one that keeps him on short leash and is quite inescapable.  As you can already see, we have been compiling a list of things to do when we get out of here.

But even if he won't be confined to the hospital or tethered to an IV stand, there are still limitations that bind us ever slightly.  For one, we will still have to be wary of taking him into public places, especially where there may or may not be kids en masse.  Jayne won't be able to continue receiving his immunization for another six months, at least, and he will be a little behind kids his age for a couple years.  This is especially frustrating, especially given the fact that there has been two cases of measles in Phoenix this past week.  For that period of time, Jayne's immune system will still be in recovery as his bone marrow gets back in the swing of generating the proper white cells.  And he still wants to put everything in his mouth, the closer it was found to the floor, the better.  

Even with these drawbacks, the excitement at our release is becoming more palpable with  each passing day.  We'll both be back to work, looking for a place to live that can accommodate a baby on the verge of walking between two Greek cities and a dog that hasn't seen any of us since February, when we unceremoniously abandoned him at my parents house.  We will get the opportunity to go see friends and family, instead of herding them into a tight, antiseptic room and cautioning them about washing their hands.  In short, we will have our lives back.  And while Jayne's potential for relapse will never quite fade from our minds, not for another two decades at least, I don't think that either of us will let that faze us in the slightest.  We have one of the greatest children's hospitals in the country at our back, along with our family, friends, and everyone else who has helped us and supported us from the first day that we found out Jayne was sick.  We contributed to and participated in a few different research groups in the hopes that, maybe someday, a diagnosis of cancer in a child will be treatable as any other mundane disease.  

With the love those around us and the firm support of medicine and science, Shay and I are more than prepared to step back into our lives, frayed at the edges and tattered in a corner, maybe, but ready to rebuild.  This terrible surprise has made our family stronger and our love for each other, and our son, has thrived.  There seems to be little that we can't accomplish now without effort and cooperation.  We've been through the wringer and come out the other side and that makes us mighty.

But These Apples Are Healthsome Good

It has been two weeks since we began his third course of chemotherapy and we're still waiting for his ANC to drop to zero.  Part of the delay, most likely, is the fact that both his platelets and hemoglobin dipped below acceptable levels and he had to get both levels replenished by way of back to back transfusions on Sunday, first of platelets and then whole blood.  Until his neutrophil count  does finally hit zero we're stuck in a sort of limbo, especially after the precipitously adverse reaction he had this go around.  On one end, we have the troubled digestive system, along with all of the other normal side effects of killing a portion of one's own hostile cells, and on the other, the complications inherent on finding oneself without an effective immune system but still with the desires and ambitions of someone whose lifelong dream is to put every single thing into their mouth before the age of one.  The vomiting and nausea that he experienced for most of last week turned into a variety of other stomach issues culminating in a sudden, yet inevitable, betrayal during a diaper change at four in the morning.  But that too has subsided and now the three of us wait patiently, anticipating that each morning we awake will be the morning that the dry erase closet will finally have a zero where there has been a four or thirteen.

In the meantime, young Master Wood has been determinedly impressing every nurse who has come in to take care of him and his slightly manic parents.  He is now learning how to use a walker and has very nearly learned how to stand up unaided.  The only thing really holding him back from successfully strutting around the hospital room like a plucked banty rooster is that, somewhere between his conception and birth, he was mistakenly outfitted with water skis instead of normal sized feet.  I'm sure that I'm to blame for that, somehow.  I knew that he would probably have big feet like mine, I just thought they were going to manifest themselves a little later in his life, like when he was 16 or so.  Even with such an obstacle as resembling, podiatrically at least, a cryptozoological creature from the northwestern United States, he has been making great strides towards taking his first real steps.  Part of his inspiration to do this is that crawling around on the hard hospital floor is quite uncomfortable, evident by the bruises on his knees and shins.  And while you find the most interesting things with your nose only inches from the floor (yes, even in a pristine hospital room), everyone knows that the really interesting things are really above the foot and a half threshold above the ground.

It has been interesting, and quite delightful at that, to watch Jayne develop and grow while under the constraints placed upon him while the leukemia is being forcefully evicted from his blood stream.  There were fears from many different parties that his development would be lacking, even stalled, while in the hospital.  Jayne is full of surprises, however, and it doesn't matter what life seems to throw his way, he just keeps moving forward with a smile on his face.  It's a small glimpse at the boy he is going to be soon: tenacious, willful, and infectiously happy.  It will be interesting to see how these qualities develop as he grows up.  What will he take away from this experience when he's ten?  18?  I'm not suggesting that he will remember the struggles and tribulations that he endured while he had the broviac sticking out of his chest.  But he will certainly get to hear about this entire endeavor, from many different sources, not to mention the fact that he will constantly be faced with the very real possibility that, at any moment, he could have to go through this all over again.  With the results of his tests and aspirates since the first round of chemo ended, there is no reason to suspect that the leukemia will every crop up again in Jayne's blood but cancer is anything but predictable.  He is going to be walking a tightrope across the chasm of his youth with a candle potentially lit, at one end or the other, underneath the cord that is guiding him from childhood to that mythical state of adulthood.

Looking at it from my perspective, I'm not worried about the way that he's going handle the situation, not even when he has a better grasp of the situation.  There's nothing that can really be done about it more than what is already being undertaken.  The medicine, the doctor's, the nurses, they are all taking it upon themselves to help Jayne's body beat this thing and so it wouldn't do to worry about that.  Nothing that either of us can possibly think about doing will help one way or another, not on a cellular level.  But our function is not to cure the cancer.  Our job is to be parents to our son, to teach him, to instill in him values, to show him how to think, and to foster his growth and development.  Similarly, his job, his conscious job, will be to play, to learn, to think, to question the universe, to figure which Star Wars movie is his favorite and why it's Empire Strikes back.  In short, his job for the duration of these hospital visits, from now until he is 21, is to be a boy.  I don't want him worried about his bone marrow aspiration results when he's five, I want him to figure out how to decide which color Pavel's spots should be in his magnum opus, which will be placed upon the fridge.  Being a survivor of cancer is always going to be a part of Jayne's life but it won't be who he his as a person.  It is a defining moment in all three of our lives but it is not the definition of him, nor our family.

In time, we will have a better idea of how this is going to affect his life.  Maybe in a few years science will develop a better way to discern if there is even a trace amount of leukemia still within Jayne's body and we won't have to have repeated tests each year.  One can hope but it isn't really necessary to assuage my thoughts on the matter.  The only outlook to have is a positive one.  Science and medicine have the cancer covered, not much more we can do, one way or t'other about that.  So, instead of using it as a focal point, I've accepted it and realized that it will run its course, one way or another, I can't really control that.  In the meantime, I will take hold of the opportunities that I do have control over, chief of which is being a good father and husband.  I would much rather concern myself over these things.

And so I bid you adieu.  I thank you all for the support that you have given my family, be it directly financial or merely moral support.  In my view, they are both worthy forms of assistance in times such as these.  It has been a long road and the end is nowhere in sight.  I do appreciate every single bit of it, even if I sometimes find myself quirking an eyebrow at its delivery.  I consider each and every one of you to be dear to me, despite the fact that I most likely haven't met more than thirty percent of you.  Anyone who takes a little bit of time out of their life, a little bit of money out of their wallet, or sheds a single tear for my son makes you worthy of it.  He really is a wonderful little boy and he means the world to me.

Thank you, very much.

Whose Color Is He Flying?

Little more than two days out from his last chemo injection and Jayne is having the worst time so far.  Since day five or so of his injections, his stomach has really been a prime issue.  It won't let him sleep for too long without a myriad of anti-nausea drugs coursing through his tiny veins and he's begun to vomit a bit more frequently than our meager wardrobe can afford.  If he hasn't eaten at all, what comes up is a bright yellow viscous liquid that resembles something that Nickelodeon once dumped on peoples heads.  If he has, he gives us a full account of what exactly it was that had been unfortunate enough to be floating in his system.  Needless to say, the little guy is quite miserable and our hospital floor has started to resemble a movie theater floor, much to the consternation of the cleaning ladies.

Thankfully he's such a unique little baby that this hardly phases him for too long.  He's more upset at the subsequent cleaning required than the brief imitation of Linda Blair he had just attempted moments before. True, he does have his moments, with his roiling stomach at war with his immense desire to just lay his head down on one of our chests and go to sleep. The only thing we can do is bear with him and try whatever we can to make him comfortable and happy.

This is, after all, nearing the home stretch.  His body has performed admirably up to this point and, with a slight change to the dose of one of the harsher chemo treatments, it's understandable that he would finally start acting less like a terminator and more like Kyle Reese.  It doesn't stop him from being a bad ass in everyone's eyes but a not so gentle reminder that he is only a tiny human being enduring an extremely rigorous medical treatment to root out and even more sinister malady.  It's easy to forget that Jayne, the growing little boy who's bringing leukemia to it's knees, is just that: a little boy.  A little boy going through something very large and scary and unsettling.

His ANC has been going down steadily, correlating with his rise in nausea and crankiness, and the steady march towards going home before the last, long chemotherapy progresses yet another day.  As much as I look forward to the day when we won't have to caution our son from yanking on the tubes sticking out of his chest, when we won't have to chase him around with the IV stand like some medical attendant out of Beauty and the Beast, I must admit that the idea is a bit hard for me to wrap my brain around.  We've spent, seemingly, a very long time going through this ordeal that it's almost an insurmountable task ahead of us to adjust back to normal life.  How do you rebuild your life which you helped take apart, piece by piece, and then move a third of it, a quarter of it, 200 miles away and erect only a fraction of that which you took with you?  I've no doubt that it can be done, it's been done by so many families so many times that my concern seems laughable.  Just one more thing to add onto the ever growing Jenga tower that has become my small corner of the Wood family.  The only real comfort is that, though it may sway every know and then, I don't think for a second that it will topple and scatter to the winds.  But the most difficult aspect is not building the tower up and up, but putting the blocks back where they belong.

Well My Days Of Not Taking You Seriously Are Certainly Coming To A Middle

Well, it's certainly been a while but today, at around 2 in the morning, was Jayne's last chemo treatment for his third round of chemotherapy.  It was preceded by some rather intense vomiting and some general crankiness before we finally gave in and ordered him some benadryl.  After being properly dosed up, he was more than willing to lay down and let his mom feed him.  He even managed to sleep through most of the night.  And so now, with three of the four treatments completed, we wait for his ridiculously high
ANC (over 2000!) to drop down to zero before it makes the arduous journey back up to acceptable levels. This should take no longer than it did with the last treatment, so we anticipate being out of the hospital for our short, and final, reprieve around the 24th of this month.  After that will come the last and most intense course that Jayne will have had to go through.  14 days of chemo to blast the remaining cancer cells, if there are any, out of his system, time to allow his ANC to come up, a bone marrow aspiration as a final check to see if he is, in fact, cancer free, and then his broviac tube will come out.  Even by a conservative estimate, that means we will be able to escape from Phoenix by the middle of July.

It's hard to believe just how long these past few months have stretched out, both because of our confinement to our antiseptic holding cell and because of the leaps and bounds that Jayne's development has taken.  He has taken to crawling like a fish to flopping on the deck of a boat.  It's no longer an ordeal for him to pull himself up and scoot along the wall, the couch, the bed to get at whatever we have missed in keep something else out of his reach.  He's becoming much more vocal, singing along with Frozen or constantly making raspberries at the nurses or his parents.  He's fairly confident in his ability to convey "bye bye".  Not that he actually says it, not on purpose at least, but he has gotten the wave down.

Oh, and his first tooth is coming in.

It's sometimes unfathomable just how much has happened to our little guy in this short amount of time.  He looks like a little boy, not just an infant.  His personality is starting to shine through and he's starting to have very real reaction to his mother and I.  Our little baby, who this time last year was nothing more than a black and white picture on our fridge, is turning into a wee lad.  And he's done all of this while kicking the crap out of leukemia.  Most kids his age don't have to worry about grabbing the cords inserted into his veins and ripping them out.  Most kids don't have to worry about being tethered like some inmate breaking rocks. Despite these limitations, which are merely the tip of the iceberg, he has been a bright ray of sunshine, winning over the hearts of every single person who he has come into contact and being an inspiration to every single one of us.  If this baby can get through such adversity with a smile on his face, surely we can muster the same determination within ourselves to overcome whatever comes our way.

My son is, in my eyes, Superman.  While the radiation of the yellow sun, like the medicine and science doing most of the legwork in his fight with cancer, did make Superman super human, it did not make him a superhero.  Even if he isn't stepping into the ring with each and ever cancer cell and knocking them out one by one, he still has the heart of a fighter, of a hero.  His fight is with the things that surround him, not that microscopic civil war within his blood stream.  All of the tests, all of the poking, all of the medicine, the strangers, the unfamiliar places, the uncomfortable machines, the tubes, and the utter lack of ability to fully understand what is happening to him and why are all things that would have left most people stooped and trodden upon, feeling lost and depressed.  But he has taken everything in stride, putting one hand in front of knee at a time, and just smiling when another thing pops up.  He's an extraordinary little guy and he always will be.

So, thank you all, once again, for supporting my Kal El.  It isn't easy for anyone to watch a baby go through what he's been through and we are very grateful for everything that everyone has done to help the three of us get through this and, more importantly, land on our feet when the hospital makes us hand in our decoder rings.  It's always nice to know that wherever we look, we have people supporting us in whatever way they can, whether they are family and friends or the doctors and nurses working tirelessly to get Jayne back up to a hundred percent.

Planet's Coming Up A Mite Fast

The past few days have been quite eventful indeed.  Not only has wee baby Jayne been crawling around the entire hospital room roaring like a dinosaur and smashing cookies into his play mat, but he's also had three dressing changes in five days, two of which were "emergency", he pulled out his IV tubes (not the actual broviacs, so it wasn't as bad as it sounds) twice yesterday, even managing to get the aforementioned cooked jammed into one, and has been generally terrorizing his mother at night when he should be sleeping.  On the positive side, his ANC has been climbing rather quickly over these hectic days, culminating in the news we got today that he hit 260 this morning.  This was rather exciting since the last time we were discharged from the hospital, we had been given the pity vote to let him leave when he topped 200, since we had been in the room for so long, waiting for his ANC to recover.  This time around was fairly long as well, if the tick marks on the wall and the chained skeleton in the corner are any indication, but getting out six days earlier than before is still a marked improvement.

And now, as we begin to go through the logistics of packing our base camp up and moving out for a while, we come to the halfway point of his chemotherapy.  It seems such an indeterminable amount of time that he has been battling cancer that it is almost incredible to think that there is a halfway point.  Yet, here we are, staring down the mad junk yard dog which has wreaked havoc in families past that is childhood cancer and, it would seem, that Jayne is actually making that dog cow and roll over for him.  Now, we aren't halfway through this entire experience, not by a long shot, seeing as how we'll be coming to clinics until he is getting ready for first grade, if not longer than that, but it nice to think that we won't have to be tethered to the IV stand, to the hospital, to this accursed desert village for very much longer.

When be started this whole ordeal in the beginning of February, the road ahead looked so impossibly daunting, so terribly devastating, so thoroughly apocalyptic that neither of us was quite sure what to make of it.  We had no idea what to expect from the process or from the hospital.  We didn't know what this would do to Jayne's development, to our marriage, or to our lives from then on.  It was a giant black hole which sucked up any sort of foresight and presented such long, yet unfathomably, odds that even Vegas wouldn't touch us with a ten foot Mafia-run pole.  We've come beyond the event horizon of Jayne's journey through cancer treatment and now we sit on the edge of an entirely new dimension, one where our son has cancer but he is slowly, but surely, beating it back.  He's crawling around, developing his social skills, roaring like a dinosaur, trying out the different flavors of raspberry there are to be explored.

That isn't to say that none of us has come out unscathed by this whole experience, what with me having to work a bit more, leaving Shay here to tend to the small monster that they switched for our son in the hospital where he was born, but we're working through it.  It isn't something that we could have anticipated when Shay and I first found out that we were going to have a baby, it wasn't spelled out on our wedding cake that we would have to watch our son simultaneously weaken and forge himself through the fires of leukemia.  Now that we are here, I don't think that either of us would have balked at the opportunity because our little family is pretty much the best thing we have going for us and that will continue to be the case as it grows up and out, ever so slightly.  One of the coolest things, I always said, was that I could marry my best friend and then, as a result, create another best friend out of that.  I wouldn't trade anything at all for what I have now, cancer and all, because that's just how life goes sometimes.  We didn't have any control over the way that our DNA was spliced within the fertilized zygote that, 9 months later, gave this little ball of awesome to Shay and I.  Really, the only control we have is in our reaction to this entire situation and how we choose to view it.

Along the way, and quite likely throughout the entire process, there has been quite a bit of outpouring of support for the three of us.  Our loved ones, our friends, our distant acquaintances, and complete strangers have shown us just how giving people can be when presented with the opportunity.  There has been an incredible amount of work put into supporting us while we support Jayne in his fight, from baked goods to organizing fundraisers for us.  Every little bit has been greatly appreciated.  We've also received a fantastic amount of support from the hospital itself.  The PCT's, the nurses, the doctors, even the cleaning staff have lent as much support as they could to help us through this.  Some of them did this in very personal ways, those of whom had day to day contact with our little unit.  The nurses and techs have all been helpful and loving in every way they can.  After all, it's hard to meet Jayne and not instantly fall in love with him.  The doctors have been tireless in their treatment of the leukemia and everything else that has popped up, from the sporadic fevers to the potential contamination of his line (yet again, he rolled around in his poop; I didn't think he had had that much contact with our dog before going to the hospital).  PCH has been instrumental in Jayne's recovery.  Their research, methods, and precautions are the reason that he is doing so well and I'm very grateful to every single person in this building for what they've done for my son and what they will continue to do for future sons and daughters of all ages who come through their doors.

He Was Non-Specific As To How

So, while not everything has righted itself with Jayne's inevitable recovery, there is a bit of light amidst the hazy gray of a hospital in Phoenix.

When Shay and I were ultimately convinced to start up a gofundme, neither of us was entirely sure that we were comfortable with people giving us money, as it were.  Sure, we knew that were going to be in the hole after everything was said and done.  Sure, we knew that trying to live day to day on hopes, wishes, and faith would be quite laughable.  But, still, we were never comfortable with taking money from other people so that we could continue to get by while our baby fights off cancer.  Eventually, we gave in and started one with the minimal goal of 5 thousand, a goal that we figured we would never see the fulfillment of for the duration of our stay.  We admitted that there might be a chance of overly generous people finding it within their hearts to contribute to our personal disaster.

I never expected the fulfillment of that number to come and, surely, I never suspected that it would happen in the manner in which it did.

As most of you know, there is a certain fighter who is taking a step back and playing Mickey to our Jayne.  Sure, he has spent most of his career fighting for himself, honing his craft and making a name for himself.  But when the chips are down, when Jayne needed to run up the steps of the Philadelphia Museum of Art, Justin was there to play Eye of the Tiger, guitar and vocals all the way.  I don't want to denigrate the efforts that most of you, all of you, have put forth for my little guy, but Justin Gaethje took it to another level.

You've read about the donations he gave to the auction in Pima and those he inspired in the World Series of Fighting.  It put a different spotlight on our tiny cancer champion than just that.  Most of our audience was family and friends.  Our cheerleader squad was composed of aunts and uncles, grandparents and cousins.  Today, however, he went above and beyond.  He met our five thousand dollar goal.  He didn't send us a message, he didn't comment it anywhere that I could find, and he didn't try to self-promote as he did it.  But he gave to my son purely for his sake.  Maybe he won't say something about it, but I will venture into that territory.  Everyone else reading this, stop, right now.  The longer you read, the redder his cheeks are going to get (yes, I mean the badass fighter).

Thank you, Justin.  You never had a reason to take an interest in my son's struggle other than the fact that your mother, a woman I can heartily identify with because we both love our son very much, mentioned it to you (as far as I know).  Despite no prior contact with this little ball of handsome personality, you decided to give it your all towards our family.  You managed to attract the attention of your own organization and journalists who wouldn't have given a second though about another baby with leukemia.  It isn't cruel because it is reality, there are too many babies, developmentally and in the eyes of their parents, afflicted with this terrible disease.

If your generosity, Justin, can bring the spotlight on this smallest of generations, whether they have cancer, developmental diseases, or even just born without a silver spoon, I say to you "Cheers mate."  You have done a great service to my family.  To Jayne.  To me.  You sir, are a wonderful human being, as most of us are but rarely have the balls to actually exhibit.  When Jayne is declared cancer free, I would like for you and him to meet.  So that he could have the honor of meeting one of the many fighters in his corner and that you
might have the pleasure of meeting the boy they call Jayne.