I Don’t Like to Say the “C” Word (Part 1)

I was on my way to the University of Alabama with a couple of Upward Bound students to tour campus and my phone rang. It was a nurse from the UAB Pediatric Hematology and Oncology Clinic at Children’s Hospital. My nine-year-old son, Nicholas, had a synovial sarcoma. Cancer.

It started with a lump. Well…it really started with a scream. Sometime between Thanksgiving and Christmas of last yeat, Nicholas and his sister were playing in his room, and as often happens, it got a little rough. Usually, someone ends up crying with their feelings hurt. Usually it is Katy. This time it was Nick screaming in pain and anger about Katy hurting his arm. A close look at Nicks arm showed a small knot on his right wrist. It looked like the kind of goseegg one might get when one bumps one’s head on a cabinet or something.

Only it didn’t go away.

By the beginning of February, we got concerned that it was still there and it still hurt when it was touched. So my wife tok Nick to a local doc-in-the-box. This was a mistake.

They took an x-ray and said that there was nothing wrong with the bones. There was nothing broken. So they sent Nick home with no explanation about the lump on his arm.

Later in February we were still concerned about this thing that would not go away. My wife took NIck to his pediatrician. They x-rayed his arm and repeated what the doc-in-a-box said: the bones were not broken. The also said that they didn’t know what the mass was, but they did know it wasn’t involved with the bone. So that was good. And they referred us to Dr. Conklin, a pediatric orthopedist at Children’s South.

Dr. Conklin also took and x-ray and said that he didn’t know what the mass was. He wanted an MRI.