Amazing Gracie

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A Father's Story

For years I drove by Children’s Hospital Oakland thinking, “Please let me live without ever having to take my child to the hospital.” I couldn’t imagine the good that happened there, only the heartache and suffering. Then I learned first hand that this is where you go when your child has cancer.

Kyra Grace, our daughter, had been a very healthy infant. Then just before she turned 19 months she started to limp. My wife, Suzanne, thought we should take Gracie to the pediatrician. She was right. After one look Dr. Bruce Horwitz said, “Let’s do an x-ray and some blood work.” The blood work showed nothing, but the x-rays told an ominous tale. Unusual lines radiated through Gracie’s femur, and we needed to find out why.

We arrived at Children’s Outpatient Clinic with Gracie’s diaper bag, a lot of questions and some massive fears. We had no idea what to expect. The receptionist, Cora, called our name, and we began the first day of more than two years of constant chemotherapy and treatment.

Gracie was diagnosed with Acute Lymphoblastic Leukemia (ALL), a cancer of the white blood cells. The shock of hearing a diagnosis of cancer for your child cannot be tempered. It hits you like a frying pan in the face. There is no preparation. You don’t spend time worrying about it or you’d go crazy. Even when your pediatrician tells you that the oncologist is expecting you in little over 12 hours you don’t really comprehend.

But the news eventually sinks in. Then you recover and start the fight. In this fight you need relentless, smart and experienced partners. We found such partners at Children’s when we met Dr. Barbara Beach and the personnel of Children’s Hematology/Oncology department. Over the next few days Dr. Beach and her colleagues explained to us that the treatment for ALL is chemotherapy. They told us that the recommended chemo protocol would give Kyra Grace a greater than 50 percent chance for cure. At the end of that treatment, if all went well, Gracie would go off chemo. She would be monitored for relapse, and after remaining disease-free for five years, she could be declared “cured.”

It’s been more than six years since Kyra Grace was diagnosed with cancer. She’s been off chemo for a few years and has been in remission since February 2000.

Whether their children are in remission, cured, or still in treatment, parents of kids with cancer never really relax. Your mind tells you if it happened once, it could happen again. But these days, that fatalistic thought is often pushed away by a brighter one: maybe, just maybe, the brains and dedication of her doctors, the caring and experience of her nurses, the aid and support of the other families, and our love for our daughter may see Gracie “cured.”