KANNAPOLIS — The Courtney family is thankful for the little things.
Like spending time with family at Christmas.
And a little boy who has the energy to be precocious.
And hair. They’re very thankful for his brown head of hair.
“We have hair now,” Chanda Courtney said recently. “We’re so excited.”
The Courtneys — Chanda, Brian and Jacob — have pictures hung on the walls in their Kannapolis home of Jacob without hair. They have a photo album full of pictures of Jacob without hair.
It was one of the effects of the cancer that struck Jacob more than a year ago, and the treatment that followed.
But this time last year, it was the least of their worries.
In the fall of 2000, a nearly 2-year-old Jacob began to show signs that something was wrong, Chanda said. Employees at his day-care center, Kids Korner, told the Courtneys that he was acting despondent and wouldn’t play.
At home, he wasn’t eating. And he walked around holding his back, his mother says, “like you would if you were really pregnant.”
And when Chanda came home from a business trip he didn’t even get off the couch to greet her.
The Courtneys took Jacob for testing, but doctors couldn’t figure out what was wrong with him. They scheduled an MRI for Nov. 1, but delayed it until Nov. 2.
Around 9 p.m. on Nov. 1, Jacob started running a fever. And he was in great pain.
“He was just rolling from side to side like something was really bad hurting him,” Chanda says.
His parents rushed him to NorthEast Medical Center, where doctors performed a battery of x-rays. The images showed what appeared to be an enlarged heart, but what further tests at Carolinas Medical Center in Charlotte revealed was a tumor as big as two softballs.
The cause was a type of cancer called neuroblastoma. According to the Foundation for the Children’s Oncology Group, neuroblastoma is the third most common form of cancer in children, and one of the most deadly.
The tumor was “smack dab in the middle of his chest,” Chanda says and had shoved his heart forward.
The Courtneys were frightened.
“We tried to mentally prepare ourselves for the worst,” Chanda says. “We were scared to death. We thought he was going to die.”
Hard to get at, the tumor forced doctors to collapse one of Jacob’s lungs just to biopsy the mass.
Chemotherapy shrunk the tumor by half, then virtually destroyed it. But the process also disintegrated the mass. Pieces of it slid into Jacob’s torso.
He has two scars — one on his back, from when doctors did the first biopsy, and one on his stomach, from when they had to biopsy the pieces.
After the first round of chemotherapy, the Courtneys took Jacob to Duke University Medical Center, where doctors used a process called pheresis to harvest young cells, called stem cells, for a transplant operation. They hoped to replace the cancer-causing cells with healthy ones.
The stem cell collection took three months to complete, and lasted three to four hours a day, several days a week.
Jacob sat still for it, didn’t complain. No one could believe it, Chanda says. No one but the Courtneys.
“In my heart, I think he knew that he was sick,” his mother said.
Chanda took time off from work as an information technology specialist at Pillowtex. She hadn’t returned in December, and expressed gratitude to what she called her “Pillowtex family” for their support, as well as that of Brian’s employer, Technologies Edge in Concord.
On May 5, Jacob was admitted to Duke for the operation. But first, he had to undergo five days of intensive chemotherapy that wiped out not only cancerous cells, but healthy ones as well, Chanda says.
Jacob sailed through the surgery and recovery, she says.
Now, he’s living as normal a life as possible, aside from a still-low white cell count, a sensitivity to bright light and continued trips to the hospital for check-ups.
He certainly didn’t lack energy recently when a stranger showed up at his door. He immediately issued an invitation to come to his room and play.
“Sit down, have a seat,” he said to the visitor, who was only crouching, figuring the little boy wouldn’t notice if he really sat down or not.
“Come on in,” Jacob said to another visitor just arriving, and introduced him to the first visitor, who was by now sitting cross-legged on the floor and playing with plastic building blocks.
Quite a little gentleman. His mom says he got that way from spending so much time around adults at Carolinas Medical Center and Duke.
The experience changed his parents, too. They learned more about childhood cancer than they ever wanted to know.
“Brian and I have seen so many kids die this past year,” Chanda said.
Now Chanda is putting together a book to help parents in the children’s oncology ward at Duke through the experience. And she’s joined a support group for parents of children with cancer at Carolinas Medical.
She and others from that group, called Rainbow of Hope, were to go to the nation’s capitol Sept. 12-15 — September is Childhood Cancer Awareness Month — to lobby legislators for changes in testing requirements. But the events of Sept. 11 upended their plans.
One thing they’d ask is mandatory urine testing of children who display cancer symptoms. Chanda says that would have caught her son’s neuroblastoma earlier.
For now, the Courtneys are looking forward.
Thanks to the stem cell transplant, Jacob has a 90 percent chance at a healthy life. But he is not out of the woods. He’ll be monitored to make sure he stays cancer-free and he progresses developmentally.
The chemotherapy could have side-effects that the Courtneys will have to watch for.
But he’s healthy now. He turns 3 years old Wednesday. He returns to day care that same day. And with all that hair and playful, precocious energy, you’ll hardly pick him out of the crowd.
Chanda said she and her husband thank God every day for that.
“We’re extremely grateful that he’s here, and that he’s alive and he’s doing well,”she said.
Today's News
