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Oliver Nicholas Keller was born on August 29th, 2002. It was the greatest day of our lives. He was the first boy born into the Pallone side of the family in 50 years. He was admired from the very start! As a baby, Oliver’s brilliant personality and skills emerged quickly. He was silly, chubby, quick, and clever. He was doing 25 piece jigsaw puzzles by the age of 10 months! Oliver loved the typical boy things … trucks, cars, planes, superheroes, baseball, and wrestling with Daddy.
Life was normal for us. We had another baby boy, Cole. Oliver and Cole became the best of friends. When Oliver turned four, he went to preschool. He loved school. He enjoyed making new friends and was delighted to share with us all the prayers and songs that he learned each day. He just amazed us with how smart he was, telling us every detail while driving home from school.
We had a perfect Christmas that year (2006). The boys were a blast, and we traveled to Connecticut to be with my family, it was just perfect. No one could have prepared us for how the New Year would begin. That January of 2007, I noticed that Oliver started to have a lazy eye. It would happen so fast, and infrequently, I didn’t even discuss it with my husband. “Lazy eye” was in my family, no big deal. Then one afternoon, sitting down for lunch, Oliver told us that he was seeing two mommies and two daddies. I called the pediatrician, who recommended that we take him to the Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia to “rule out anything major”. We rushed right there, and about five hours later, around 10 pm on January 25th, we knew our perfectly brilliant son had brain cancer. A tumor called a medulloblastoma had formed in his cerebellum. I died inside. My husband and I were terrified, angry, heartbroken, and confused. We asked “Why me, why him?” over and over again. There were no answers to be given. We just sat there, signed consent forms, and cried. The next morning Oliver had emergency surgery to remove the tumor. Our families and friends all sat with us in the waiting room. It took five hours for the surgical team to remove the tumor. And, they got it, all of it! From that morning on, Oliver’s life was changed forever. He woke up unable to speak, walk, feed himself, or use the potty. He was in agony, and just as angry and confused as we were. This was just the beginning of a long healing process.
Oliver was going to need to draw upon all the skills he had learned as an infant till now to help him through this healing process. And he has done it with the gusto of a superhero. His perseverance and willingness to learn has been inspiring. For the first five weeks, Oliver utilized sign language to communicate. He went through intense physical, occupational, and speech therapies while going through high-dose chemotherapy, which was needed to rid him of any remaining cancerous cells. There have also been many roadblocks along the way, those that have even baffled this country’s top doctors. They joke saying, “Oliver is writing his own book with this journey of curing brain cancer.” He almost went into kidney failure, and had heart problems. He has caught the strangest of viruses, and has been taken off chemo, and back on chemo numerous times. Throughout it all, he has smiled, and persevered like nothing I have ever seen before, as if he were our very own superhero. He has regained all the skills that were taken from him and has discovered a new love for miniature golf. He even shot a hole in one and celebrated his fifth birthday at a miniature golf course.
After months of watching Oliver battle cancer, we refuse to sit and watch him be tortured by this horrible disease, and do nothing. Brain cancer is the leading cause of death among children diagnosed each year with cancer. A fact very few know. There is a reason this happened to our baby, and our family. We think part of that reason is to educate anyone who will listen and learn about this cancer, and help raise the money needed to do the research for a cure. Oliver wants to help other kids who have “brain boo-boos”, he wants to make them “OK”, and maybe help them not to cry too much. And we want to help him make that happen … for him, for us, and for any family afflicted by cancer.
- Nicole Keller
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