Danny+Freitas

Life, when looked at abstractly, is a dance with fate, a continuum of random events that happen, or don’t happen, and that themselves lead to, or don’t lead to, other events, with the only eventual certainty being death. Some people play that game of chance better than others, that is if you define ‘better’ as a longer delay to an eventual end, and some people fall prey, by chance, to events that cut their time relatively shorter. Still there are others, more resilient and perplexing than everyone else, that defy even the most foreboding odds. That become victims of chance, that maintain resolve in solidarity, that refuse to accept the outcome handed to them by fate, and that inspire humanity to believe we are not bound by any one life path, but instead have the ability to define our own prospects. This is a story about one of those other people. A few weeks before christmas in 2012, Larry and Suzanne Booher took their son Caulin, a 9-year-old boy at the time, to their pediatrician because he was having what seemed like fairly constant allergy symptoms. At first pass, Caulin seemed perfectly healthy, nothing of immediate concern other than a growing child whose immune system wasn’t the biggest fan of pollen, or grass, or maybe dogs. However, to pass along a certain clean bill of health, they recommended Caulin to receive X-rays of his adenoids, which turned out to be swollen, a cause for concern but still a common problem, especially in younger children. As the swelling worsened they recommended surgery, sent the removed tissue for lab testing, and when the results came back showing malignancy, Caulin’s allergy symptoms turned quickly into T-cell Acute Lymphoblastic Leukemia (ALL). Caulin and his family live in Dayton, Ohio, a busy and growing city but a place that remains moderately conservative, where cottonwood falls much like like snow in the months of June and July, where sunsets and starlight and seasons are more much distinct, and traditional family values have yet to subside in the recent waves of modernization and pressure to be competitive. Larry works as the owner and president of Booher carpeting and rugs, and Suzanne plays the role of supermom, cooking breakfast, lunch and dinner, driving Caulin and his sister, Samantha, to and from school and soccer practices, and managing to maintain the house all the while. They would occasionally drive two hours south of Dayton to lake St. Mary’s, a remote town lined with cottages amongst acres and acres of rich Ohioan farm land to spend a weekend at Caulin’s grandparents’s house. They spent time riding jet skis, the family’s pontoon boat, or running around at night trying to catch fireflies. Caulin especially enjoyed driving his grandparents’ golf cart all over the small lakeside community and fishing for catfish off their family’s boat dock. All of this, their (relatively) normal routine that all but disproved murphy’s law, would have to soon change. ALL is a cancer of the blood, derived initially from either lymphocytes or lymphoblasts, both precursors to the formation of white blood cells, corner stones of our immune system. The term acute references that the cancer divides quickly, and aggressively, crowding out the healthy blood cells present in the bone marrow. It wasn’t long before Caulin’s condition began showing itself more aggressively. Slowly, Caulin had to begin staying indoors, resting more, he had to quit soccer, stop taking trips to the lake, and soon after, take a leave of absence from his fourth grade class. As the crowding out of his healthy blood cells worsened, Caulin began experiencing constant fevers due to his bodies need to work harder than normal to fight of simple infections, even a common cold, and also fatigue, coming from his bodies lack of healthy red blood cells, providing less oxygen to his tissue and muscles. The tumor also caused continued swelling of his lymph nodes, and the lack of platelets worsened his bodies ability to plug’ broken blood vessels beneath the skin, an occurrence that is fairly common even in healthy individuals, and because of this, experienced easier and unusual bruising. All of this, coupled with the beginning of his treatment and constant stays in Dayton’s Children’s hospital quickly consumed what was a normal childhood, much like the cancer began consuming his body. Six months after beginning chemotherapy, Caulin wasn’t showing tremendous progress, and Dr. Mukund Dole, at Dayton’s Children’s Hospital, linked this to a genetic translocation, specifically a Robertsonian translocation involving chromosomes 15 and 21. What this meant for Caulin is that since his cancer was being driven by a problem as deep as his genetic inheritance, chemotherapy, no matter how immediately effective in killing metastasized tumor cells, would not solve the problem of his cancer coming back. Instead he would need a bone marrow transplant to have any hope of remission. A literal ripping away of Caulin’s abnormal bone-forming stem cells that would be replaced with healthy, functioning stem cells, a process that when done correctly, would essentially rebuild Caulin’s immune system from scratch. Since rebuilding someones immune system requires it first to be taken away, this procedure required Caulin to undergo a 42-day isolation, in which he could not interact with anyone but his parents or grandparents due to his spiked risk for infection. Caulin fought hard and coped well, armed with video games and guns to preserve what little chance he had to remain a kid, and returned home after showing significant progress and initial remission. Unfortunately, after returning home, Caulin developed ‘graft-versus-host’ syndrome, a fairly common condition for bone marrow transplant patients, where Caulin’s new immune system, although effective in fighting the cancer, began attacking his own body, and over the course of its progression he began exhibiting fevers, swollen lymph nodes, legions of the liver, etc... This led eventually to even worse news for both Larry and Suzanne Booher, the formation of another, fully developed cancer, this time, a B-cell lymphoma. Caulin had now not only fought off one form of cancer, but in the process contracted a second form, beginning the long up hill battle yet again.