Growing up as the son of a Baptist minister, Jonathan Gross says he went to church whether he wanted to or not.
“By being in church all the time, it becomes part of your mindset,” he says, ‘and when you leave home and start your own life, it’s still with you.”
It was the faith of his childhood that sustained 22-year-old Jonathan when he was diagnosed with
osteosarcoma, an aggressive form of bone cancer, in February of 2000.
“It would have been impossible for me to have faced getting that news without knowing that God was in control of my life,” he says. “You may believe in relying on faith and walking by faith, but when you get put to a test like this, your walk better match your talk.”
After graduating from Faith Christian Academy in Martinsburg, W.Va., in 1997, Jonathan continued his education at York Technical Institute, a business/career college in York, Pa., less than 100 miles from where he had grown up in Hagerstown, Md. He moved in with his grandmother, Jeanette Brown of
Woodleaf, when he started an internship at Pillowtex in Kannapolis in January of 1999, continuing to work for the company after graduation that spring.
He looked forward to going to work every day. “I know a lot of people dread going to work,” he says, “but I love my job.”
After attending Needmore Baptist Church with his grandmother that year, one of Jonathan’s friends convinced him that he needed to be part of a larger congregation where there would be more people his age. So he started the year 2000 by going to Calvary Baptist Church in Winston-Salem, where the first Sunday, there were 70 people in his Bible fellowship.
All of them were single professionals between the ages of 22 and 32.
It was a wonderful group which gave him a lot of support, Jonathan says, and it didn’t take him long to realize the divine timing in his move to Calvary.
In February of last year, Jonathan went to a doctor at NorthEast Medical Center in Concord, complaining of pain in his left leg. He had first noticed it in December, when his job took him to Pennsylvania for two weeks.
“I was hobbling around that plant in pain,” he says. “It just gradually got worse over time, so I went and had it checked out.”
The doctor ran some tests and called Jonathan at work with the news. He would have to run a bone scan to confirm it, but he thought the pain was coming from a tumor in his leg.
“When he said it, I was pretty much sure of it then,” Jonathan says.
His parents, who were still living in Hagerstown at the time, were in a state of disbelief. “That’s something that happens to older people,” says his mother, Wanda. “You just don’t think of it happening to someone who’s 20 years old.”
After graduating from West Rowan High School, Wanda Brown had attended Southeastern Baptist Seminary in Wake Forest, where she met Richard Gross of Joppa, Md. They married, and he was pastoring a church in Hagerstown when their first and only child was born.
Jonathan grew up being active in the church, with lots of love and attention from the congregation, and his father was still pastor there when he moved to North Carolina.
“Being in the ministry all these years, we ministered to families who were going through major medical crises,” Wanda says. “The temptation is to say ‘I know how you feel,’ but you can’t really understand how anyone feels who goes through something like this until you do it yourself.”
The doctor at NorthEast ordered a bone scan for Jonathan and set him up an appointment with a specialist at Carolinas Medical Center in Charlotte.
Wanda says the specialist told them there were two other possibilities — one was another type of tumor that was benign and one was a bacterial infection with similar symptoms.
“I just prayed and prayed that that was the news that we were going to get at the end of the biopsy,” she says.
But the biopsy results confirmed what Jonathan already knew in his heart, that he had cancer. A scan showed a mass in his left lung, and Jonathan underwent biopsy surgery for the second time in three days.
The news was bad. The osteosarcoma, which forms hard, bone-like tumors, had spread to his left lung.
Jonathan started on chemotherapy treatment, going into the hospital for five days at a time before being released for three days, then readmitted for three more days. This made up one round of treatment, according to his father, and after each of the six rounds he was given, he would get a break for two weeks.
“So that’s been a lot of trips to Charlotte,” he says. “I’d been keeping the road hot out of Maryland from my church.”
Wanda had given up her teaching job and moved in with her mother to help care for Jonathan, and after driving back and forth for more than a year, Richard started work as the new pastor at Oakdale Baptist Church in Spencer this past May.
After the six rounds of chemotherapy, Richard says doctors found that only 20 percent of the tumor cells had been destroyed. “That was probably the cue to everybody involved that we were in for a rough year,” he says.
But even then, Jonathan says he couldn’t have imagined just how rough it would turn out to be.
“To be honest with you, I was in cruise control even after the diagnosis,” he says. “I was told they were going to save my leg, I would have 22 treatments of chemo and then I would be done. So I thought, ‘Cut and dry. That’s not so bad.’ ”
But two weeks before he was scheduled to have knee replacement surgery, the doctors told him they believed their best option would be to amputate his leg at the hip to remove all the tumor cells.
They gave Jonathan the choice of trying to save his leg, offering to do a total femur replacement, but pointed out that every time the prosthesis needed work, he would have to undergo surgery to do it.
“We had come to grips a little bit with the fact that he had cancer,” his mother says. “We had been getting into the routine of going for the chemo and everything and felt like we were fighting it. Then when they said they couldn’t save his leg, that was just devastating to all of us.”
Despite the family’s prayers, a doctor at Duke University Medical Center, whom the Grosses consulted for a second opinion, looked at his bone scan and MRI test results and made the same recommendation: the leg needed to come off.
“Weighing the options,” Jonathan says, “it was pretty much the hardest, easiest decision I’ll ever have to make in my life, probably, to go ahead and lose my leg.”
The days leading up to the June 9, 2000, amputation were very difficult for Jonathan and his family. But once it was over, his mother says, “It was like the Lord gave us the peace that it was the right decision.”
Looking back, more than a year later, she says it was like God had prepared them for the inevitable one step at a time. After the cancer diagnosis, Jonathan’s doctor put him on crutches so he wouldn’t put as much weight on his leg.
Then when his femur fractured due to the damage caused by the tumor, he wore a brace from his foot to his hip and wasn’t allowed to use his leg at all. Jonathan learned to use his crutches so well during this time that he was able to go back to them without any physical therapy after his amputation.
Jonathan tried to keep up with his job throughout the year, oftentimes working on a laptop from the hospital or at home, continuing chemotherapy treatments through December.
When he began experiencing pain in his right leg, he feared the worst. A scan found no tumor cells in his remaining leg, but showed that the cancer had spread to his spine and had actually fractured it.
By this time, Jonathan had resumed his life as much as possible and had even gone deer hunting and traveled to attend a friend’s wedding in Chattanooga. “I had a fractured spine the whole time and didn’t know it,” he says.
He was one treatment away from being finished with his chemotherapy when the tumors showed up in his spine. “I got knocked down again,” he says.
Following surgery in January to fuse three vertebrae in his spine and clean out the tumor cells around it, Jonathan went through rehabilitation, spending two weeks in the hospital.
After more chemotherapy and radiation failed to stop the spread of the cancer in his body, Jonathan’s oncologist told him about an experimental treatment being offered at the Mayo Clinic. He and his parents set out for the Minnesota clinic, taking three days to make the trip so he wouldn’t get too tired.
A doctor there put him on an experimental inhalant drug for his lungs and told him about another treatment he wanted to try, in which a radioactive isotope would be infused into his body to specifically target the abnormal cells in his bone.
As part of the treatment, Jonathan would undergo stem cell harvesting at Carolinas Medical Center, in which baby stem cells would be filtered from his blood and frozen for injection during the treatment. The purpose of the stem cells, which would be removed before they are infected by the cancer cells, would be to regenerate the bone marrow and bring Jonathan’s blood cell counts back up, reducing the risk of infection or other side effects from the aggressive treatment.
Six weeks after he was seen at the Mayo Clinic, scans of his lungs, pelvis and abdomen showed the cancer continuing to spread. “There’s a tumor growing on my left side in the incision from my back surgery,” Jonathan says.
“I’ve been feeling the tumor there for the past month and a half that’s probably the size of a tangerine or small orange.”
In the meantime, the company which provides Jonathan’s health insurance at Pillowtex has refused to pay for the stem cell harvesting which would be required for the treatment because, even though it is standard protocol for some types of cancers, it is considered experimental for
osteosarcoma.
“It’s been denied and appealed three times,” his father says. “The Minnesota doctor and our oncologist in Charlotte have been unable to sway them. Blue Cross and Blue Shield has really been good, but by contract they don’t have to do this.
“So it’s just we’re going to live and die by the contract.”
The stem cell transplant would cost between $75,000 and $100,000, and that doesn’t include the actual cost of the treatment itself.
A barbecue chicken benefit organized by the Women’s Missionary Society and the preteen Sunday school class at Needmore Baptist Church raised more than $8,000 to cover the travel expenses for the treatment.
With the cancer spreading to his son’s vital organs, his father has opened a trust for Jonathan at Central Carolina Bank in Spencer for anyone wanting to donate toward the cost of the stem cell transplant. If they should end up not using the money, Wanda says it would be given to a foundation to help families of cancer patients with the cost of treatment.
Jonathan and his family have also been in contact with a bone marrow foundation set up by Hendrick Motorsports about a grant to go toward the cost.
The most frustrating part for Richard is the time that has been lost during the appeal of the insurance. “I wish we could have just gone to Minnesota and done it and maybe this would not be in his back right now,” he says. “We let them fight for two months and now the cancer is back in his back at the base of his spine.”
The real battle right now, Richard says, is to shrink the tumors in his son’s lungs so that the doctors at the Mayo Clinic can try to eliminate the cancer cells in his bones.
As Jonathan and his parents wait on funding and continue to pray for healing, his coworkers at Pillowtex, high school friends from Maryland and the congregations at Oakdale Baptist, Needmore Baptist, Calvary Baptist and the Hagerstown church he grew up in remain a constant source of support through telephone calls, visits, e-mails, cards and prayers.
When people tell him that they are amazed by his strength, Jonathan is quick to point out that it is not his strength. “My strength comes from the Lord,” he says he tells them.
Several scriptures have helped him through his illness, including the first part of Psalm 46:10: “Be still, and know that I am God.”
Jonathan says he also finds comfort in the words of an old hymn called “Leave it There,” which encourages Christians to turn over their burdens to the Lord.
A constant prayer in Jonathan’s life has been for God to help him to be a better Christian and to use him as a witness for others.
“Sure enough, He answered,” he says. “Be very careful what you pray for, because you might get it in ways not expected.”
Jonathan says he believes God’s purpose for his illness is for him to go through it with the best attitude possible “and let others know that I know that God is in control of this. That witness and that testimony have been seen by a lot of people.”
And as he goes through the days as normally as possible while fighting to get better, Jonathan says he is full of gratitude for the blessings in his life.
“To get up every day, that in itself is a blessing,” he says. “You take that for granted when you’re well, but when you’re sick, every day that you’re able to get up and go to work and do the normal, daily 9 to 5 routine, that is one of the greatest blessings.”
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