A boy's life

Every year, as the leaves along Salt Lake City's east bench begin to turn red and gold against the soaring gray cliffs, I think of how good it feels to drive north on I-215 and not be headed for Primary Children's Medical Center.

Twelve years ago, summer was winding down, school was gearing up, and life was good — so good, in fact, that I remember confiding to a friend that I felt a nagging sense of foreboding.

As an assistant city editor at the Deseret News, I was working that September Saturday when my husband called to say he'd just returned from the doctor's office with our 8-year-old son, Stephen. There was some concern about his blood work and the possibility of leukemia.

My foreboding turned to mild panic, and my mind raced with all the possibilities. As I drove home, I wondered whether I was blowing things out of proportion.

Cancer had already invaded my inner circle, with the treatment taking its horrific toll on my mother — and by extension, our family — not once but twice. I had seen walking death before. Yet how grateful I am she is alive to this day.

But Stephen seemed so healthy. He played soccer, raced his bike to school, played hard with the neighborhood gang. It had to be a mistake. There must be an explanation that defied science. We needed it to be OK.

My husband and I played both sides in our minds, over and over again, feeling a slow-motion sense of warped time and space engulf us over the next 24 hours. On Sunday morning, as we left for Primary Children's, I remember closing the door and knowing that our lives would never be the same again. Yet I hoped against hope that they would.

It was not to be.

Dr. Richard Lemons, a pediatric oncologist, confirmed our worst fears. Though we didn't know it at the time, he was the leading researcher in the country on our son's form of cancer — acute promyelocytic leukemia — an extremely rare and aggressive disease in children that didn't tolerate survivors.

In the blur of the bone-marrow aspiration, we were dazed at the implications. My mother had gone through months of radiation and chemotherapy at the hospital next door. I was haunted at the thought of nearly killing someone to cure them and had no desire to put my son or my family through it.

Yet without treatment, we were told Stephen had only weeks to live. We had caught this stealthy killer in the first stages, and there was hope for extending his life. If the doctors could get him into remission, there was even the possibility of a bone-marrow transplant.