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Monday, September 01, 2003

Little warrior's smile to lead way for Jimmy Fund walkers

Little warrior's smile to lead way for Jimmy Fund walkers
By Meir Rinde
Staff Writer Monday, September 1, 2003

ANDOVER -- Tracy Goodman was worried when her eight-week-old son Kane's toothless smile gave way to constant crying, but she became really alarmed a month later when his legs stopped kicking and hung motionless under his chubby little body.

When Goodman, 37, and her husband Steven, 39, rushed to Tufts Hospital for the umpteenth time one Friday night in February, doctors decided to scan Kane with an MRI. What they found caused her "absolute horror and disbelief," she said.

A neuroblastoma had wrapped itself around his spinal cord, immobilizing his lower body. Doctors immediately started giving Kane intense steroids to reduce the swelling around the cancer and prepare him for an operation Monday morning.

"Neuroblastoma is called the silent tumor," said Tracy Goodman, who has had a hurried education in oncology since her son's surgery six months ago. "Usually they find it when the child is 2 years old, but in Kane's case it hit something. Unfortunately, it was his spine, and we'll see if his legs recover."


He is still not kicking, but the constant smile has returned to Kane's round, fair face, and tests of muscle responsiveness in his legs have given the family of five hope he will fully recover and learn to walk on schedule, his mother said.

After the surgery removed much of the tumor, Kane received chemotherapy at the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute in Boston, where he was also selected as an official "hero" for the Boston Marathon Jimmy Fund Walk Sept. 21. A large photograph of Kane will be posted on a mile marker during the event, and a team of people including 20 friends and Goodman family members will walk part of the route.

Kane's sister Hadley, 5, and brother Pearson, 8, have been going door to door in the neighborhood around their Apache Avenue home collecting pledges for the walk, which is expected to raise more than $5 million to support cancer care and research. Their parents are asking business associates and friends for donations, and Tracy Goodman hopes she far exceeds the $200 in pledges the Jimmy Fund asks each adult walker to solicit.

"I just can't say enough about Dana-Farber," Goodman said. "They are amazing. What they have to deal with every day are just about the most sad, devastating stories. The kids I saw there -- if chemotherapy was their only problem, that would be great. But many of them have other issues as well."


Kane, whose name means "warrior" in Irish, is in a way lucky that the spinal problem provided an early sign of the disease and gave doctors a chance to remove the cancer before it spread further, his mother said. The four rounds of chemotherapy, cancer-killing drugs put directly into the bloodstream, apparently caused none of the worst potential side effects -- heart and hearing problems, mouth sores, crankiness -- though a few weeks after his last treatment he suddenly lost his hair.

Soon the family will take him to Philadelphia for more care at Shiners Hospital's pediatric spinal cord injury rehabilitation unit, which will build him a special "parapodium" -- a fancy baby walker, Tracy Goodman said -- and other equipment designed to encourage him to use his legs and speed their recovery.

More tests for cancer and more worry lie ahead for the Goodmans, but the worst moments for the cheerful infant are apparently already in the past, his mother said.

"You can imagine how good it feels to have such a large thing out of your body," she said. "He woke up from the surgery smiling, like the baby he was before, and he's been smiling ever since."



Printed in the Eagle Tribune Sept. 1, 2003

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