AJ

[ajflutie]

Some months ago, I posted about my son AJ who was fighting cancer. AJ was 14 when we lost him in January. ajflutie is really his screen name, he loved Flutie, who was, like AJ, a little guy at the time. He was a huge Bills, Sabres and Yankee fan. And a great little athlete. And I love and miss him so. I am writing to simply expose as many people as I can to the world of childhood cancer. It is the number 1 killer disease of children. And I hate it.

 

I ask you all to look at three things;

 

1 - a link to a slide show that my niece put together for her college class on childhood cancer;

 

http://keep3.sjfc.edu/students/amr06221/e-...swish/Swish.htm

 

2 - a link to my daughters Relay for Life page, where she is raising money to fight cancer;

 

http://main.acsevents.org/site/TR/RelayFor...;s_tafId=121488

 

3 - read a speech I was honored to give at the kick off of a charitable foundation in Houston, TX, joining the Houston soccer community together to raise money for TX Childrens Hospital. The two soccer players I mention play for the Houston Dynamo, who won the MLS cup for the second year in a row. Stuart is a 22 year old from Scotland who will be on the US Olympic team this year we hope. This is the speech I gave....

 

Good morning. My name is AJ’s Dad. That’s how you’re known here, your kids name, and then Mom or Dad. You see the doctors and nurses here, like everywhere, focus on the patient, and they know his or her name. The difference is that here, unfortunately, all the patients are children. After awhile you come to realize that being addressed that way reminds you of who you are and what your job is. Each of the parents I met here knew who they were and what their job was. Each of the parents I met here had their priorities re-thought and their life’s turned upside down from this horrible disease called cancer.

 

I guess our story is not all that remarkable, although of course we think our AJ was. It is just one story of more than 12,000 stories every year, that’s 33 a day, all about childhood cancer. All remarkable in their own way. Kelsie, Sam, Chase, Brett, Chloe, Coleman, Krista, Christopher, Tyler, I could go on.

 

Sadly, AJ cannot be here with us today physically, he left us on January 5th, 2008. I know he is here today in so many other ways. He fought a long hard battle against a rare and aggressive cancer, something called Non-Hodgkin’s Burkitt’s Lymphoma. AJ was a normal, strong, healthy 14 year old getting ready to move to back to North Carolina and start high school. He was anxious about it, leaving his buddies, worried that North Carolina football programs would not rank as high as Texas football programs. He started getting sick just before our house hunting trip up there, and when we got back, on Father’s Day 2007, he was admitted to TCH.

 

Within hours we were told he had cancer. He would have to undergo a lengthy treatment program with chemo and radiation, would have to stop sports, would lose his hair and would be very sick from getting better. It was all unreal, we were just a normal family, we had no idea that this whole world here even existed, no idea of the number of kids on 9, no idea of what lay ahead. But we knew how it would end up, AJ would be better, back to his normal self, maybe have to take a year off from football, but no big deal, he had done that before and come back. And, best of all, the words we heard that day were “if you have to be here this one isn’t bad”. Of course, as it turns out no one wants to be here, and no one wants any of them.

 

AJ truly was a remarkable young man. He was born during a blizzard in March 1993, and to this day I remember him not crying and breathing right after being born, and the doctor and nurses rushing around in the delivery room. But after he took that first breath, boy did he breath deep the rest of his life. He lived life. He was always smiling. He loved people, music, playing the guitar, animals, movies, good books. He thought. He had fun; he made people laugh, did the right things, did everything at 110%, and was simply just a joy to be around. He was the love of our lives. To unabashedly steal from his sister Katelyn, “AJ, you would say something to make me laugh or cry or think and I would just stare at you thinking how did you even think of that?” To keep stealing his best buddy Pablo said, “AJ’s character was like the sun: brilliant, golden, and able to light up the whole world”. Jimmy V would be proud of the way AJ lived.

 

Of course he loved sports. He made it all look so easy. The poor kid had to have me coach him in soccer for a few years, and that was his initiation to competition. And he thrived on it. He played for a select soccer team in North Carolina in 2000 when he was like 8 years old, and they won the State Championship and he got a championship gold medal. When we came down here, he started to play for the Classics. He was a play-up that first year, telling me it’s not the size of the dog in the fight it’s the size of the fight in the dog. After a few years of that he went on to basketball and hockey for a couple years, playing on championship teams in both, and scoring the winning goal in sudden death OT in the championship game for his hockey team one year.

 

From there, we move on to 7th grade and…….finally, after throwing him a million passes in the front yard, football. Like his life, his football career was like a bright shooting star. His school has retired his jersey. He was a fast little wide receiver/cornerback and his first year he had touchdowns in his last four games (that’s like scoring 6 goals in each game to you soccer guys). The next year, during preseason practice, on the first day of wearing cleats he caught his spikes in a drill and tore his ACL. But as a testament to his work ethic, within 6 months of surgery for the torn ACL, he came back to run track and was awarded Track Athlete of the Year. He had re-habbed, trained and fought hard to come back. And I knew that his comeback from cancer would be no less amazing.

 

But this disease does not fight fair. It does not let you beat it in a race, it does not let you tackle it and smash it to the ground. It cheats and lies. Throughout his battle with cancer AJ fought. He actually looked forward to going in for chemo and getting sick because he knew that’s what he had to do to win, and he was determined he would win. We were here for nearly 2 months straight before we got to leave the first time, and he had every complication you could imagine. But the kid never complained! And, I think if you go around this room and ask his doctors and nurses, they will tell you that every time, no matter what they did to him, how they poked and prodded him, he said thank you. Thank you Jalane, thank you KP, thank you Pat, thank you Dr. Baxter, thank you Dr. Dryer. Today, on behalf of AJ and his family, I have the chance to say thank you to you all, we know that each of you, and everyone here, did everything they could for our Age.

 

Initially, everything looked great. In July, after only two months of treatment, a scan showed no visible tumor! We only had one more round to go, another 3 weeks. But, again, cancer lied, it was still there. It came back. We tried another chemo, and then another, but nothing seemed to work. AJ knew, I suppose better than we did, what was happening. He knew what his creatin level should be; he knew what his ANC count was. But even then, deep down, we never doubted the outcome. Sure we were scared to death, but this just doesn’t happen to an ordinary family, with two kids, a dog and a cat and a mortgage. But it turns out it does.

 

In November, we started the last chemo regime, and the doctors told us that the chances were very slim that this would work. I would like to thank Pat, Mital, Jalane of TCH, and Connie Prutting my beloved sister-in-law, please stand up each of you, for helping both AJ and us through that difficult day and time. We then started this surreal stretch of coming and going and radiation and finally, hospice. I will never forget him asking me, “Dad, what’s hospice?” Can you imagine?

 

We were able to have, what AJ described as, the best Christmas ever. He loved it. Friends arranged for a white Christmas, snow all over the front yard. I can’t even begin to tell you the meaning of the things he had us get for each other. Because he knew. And we did too. We talked about it, and he was at peace. Again, never complaining, saying only “you have to play the hand you’re dealt Dad” and “I think God needs a right hand man”. Us smiling at each other and shaking our heads as I looked into those blue eyes that Pablo described by saying “just glancing at them could make you hear the ocean”. AJ remained brilliant and elegant to the end. Then, early Saturday morning, January 5th, with us at his side, AJ went to be with our God. To paraphrase Samuel Clemens, who also lost a child, “to describe our pain would be to bankrupt all the languages of all the worlds”. We love him and miss him so.

 

So how do these kids do this? How do they face the day to day fear, the boredom, the pain and the unknown? Well, I have another story to tell you. And it shows how some amazing people devote themselves to helping these amazing kids. First, we have to go back. I am not sure how we met Dr. Pat Thompson frankly, he wasn’t our doctor. But Pat started hanging out with us and became our buddy. He was fighting a losing battle, not against cancer, but against switching AJ from football back to soccer. But we didn’t tell him, he was so sincere and kind. Pat even arranged for a couple soccer players to visit AJ. So that’s when Mr. Craig Wiabel and Mr. Stuart Holden show up one day in AJs room.

 

These two guys razzed AJ about playing football, about his favorite teams, why isn’t he playing soccer and on and on. And AJ just loved it, giving em both some razzing back. He loved Craig’s story of how he was “retired” in the Xbox FIFA game. He sat wide eyed at Stuart’s story of, well let’s just say an incident. It wasn’t two famous soccer players; it was two good guys befriending someone who needed a lift. Two guys giving their time, energy and love to a kid who they didn’t even know. Now, as it turns out, they saw something in AJ and did come to know him. Craig and Stuart both took the time to call or email AJ whenever they could. And each time, AJ’s smile would brighten. AJ’s spirits would soar. Thank you both for your kindness, caring and compassion. Around that time we, like most of Houston, followed the Dynamo on the run to the cup. And celebrated when they beat New England in the championship game.

 

So this happened around mid-November. We were home and hoping and praying that the last chemo regime would be working. But we ended up back at TCH a couple weeks or so before Christmas for some palliative (another of those words you learn) radiation. It was the week Stuart Holden came around and showed the kids the MLS Championship Cup. Stuart was wearing a doctor’s jacket. And just beaming. He was so proud. AJ just lite up when he came in with that thing. It was huge and heavy! I think Stuart and AJ both just marveled at the fact that they were actually holding a professional sport championship cup. I always knew AJ would hold one. He held it up high and kissed it.

 

And then Stuart had to continue on his rounds of making kids feel better. But before he left, he put the cup aside and said, “AJ I want to give you this”. This, this was his championship gold medal that he received on the podium after the 2007 MLS championship game. He placed the medal around AJ’s neck and AJ made me so proud again. He said “Stuart I can’t accept this”. But Stuart would not relent and finally AJ just said “thank you so much”. We then heard how Stuart broke his medal and had to run to his Mom in the stands for a safety pin to fix it so it would look good for all the pictures after the game. So much like something AJ would have to do with his Mom. We laughed and cried. And finally we were left in the room with the championship medal, marveling at it and Stuart both. So now how do you say thank you for something like that? Write a card? Send an email?

 

Well, AJ would probably not like what I figured out to do, but only because he was humble. But one of AJ’s favorite sayings was “you only get what you give” and so, in true AJ spirit………, Stuart, if you would come up here please……..I would like to present you with AJ’s State Championship Gold Medal for Soccer from the year 2000. Please accept this in AJ’s honor. And when you are hurting out there, think of AJ and all these kids and how hard they fight, and keep fighting. When you are tired out there, think of AJ and all these kids, and never give up. From the bottom of my heart, and on behalf of my wife Christi, my daughter Katelyn and my beloved son AJ, thank you man.

 

So, that’s a look at AJ, at this place, at the people who work here, and some of the people who give so freely of themselves to brighten these kid’s days. I could not think of any adjectives to put before any of those nouns. Because there are none that adequately describe any of them.

 

We are all here today to help stop these kinds of stories. Nick’s Team, with your support, will aid in our war against this cheater, against this liar that these kids fight every day. To all the media here today, please, please spread the word. Please, if we end up helping just one child, one family, the world will be a better place.

 

I would like to thank Jeff, Jodie, Nick and Pat for thinking of us today and giving AJ the honor of having his story told.

 

Thank you for allowing me to share this with you today, I am AJ’s Dad.

[Sanners]

Some months ago, I posted about my son AJ who was fighting cancer. AJ was 14 when we lost him in January. ajflutie is really his screen name, he loved Flutie, who was, like AJ, a little guy at the time. He was a huge Bills, Sabres and Yankee fan. And a great little athlete. And I love and miss him so. I am writing to simply expose as many people as I can to the world of childhood cancer. It is the number 1 killer disease of children. And I hate it.

 

I ask you all to look at three things;

 

1 - a link to a slide show that my niece put together for her college class on childhood cancer;

 

http://keep3.sjfc.edu/students/amr06221/e-...swish/Swish.htm

 

2 - a link to my daughters Relay for Life page, where she is raising money to fight cancer;

 

http://main.acsevents.org/site/TR/RelayFor...;s_tafId=121488

 

3 - read a speech I was honored to give at the kick off of a charitable foundation in Houston, TX, joining the Houston soccer community together to raise money for TX Childrens Hospital. The two soccer players I mention play for the Houston Dynamo, who won the MLS cup for the second year in a row. Stuart is a 22 year old from Scotland who will be on the US Olympic team this year we hope. This is the speech I gave....

 

Good morning. My name is AJ’s Dad. That’s how you’re known here, your kids name, and then Mom or Dad. You see the doctors and nurses here, like everywhere, focus on the patient, and they know his or her name. The difference is that here, unfortunately, all the patients are children. After awhile you come to realize that being addressed that way reminds you of who you are and what your job is. Each of the parents I met here knew who they were and what their job was. Each of the parents I met here had their priorities re-thought and their life’s turned upside down from this horrible disease called cancer.

 

I guess our story is not all that remarkable, although of course we think our AJ was. It is just one story of more than 12,000 stories every year, that’s 33 a day, all about childhood cancer. All remarkable in their own way. Kelsie, Sam, Chase, Brett, Chloe, Coleman, Krista, Christopher, Tyler, I could go on.

 

Sadly, AJ cannot be here with us today physically, he left us on January 5th, 2008. I know he is here today in so many other ways. He fought a long hard battle against a rare and aggressive cancer, something called Non-Hodgkin’s Burkitt’s Lymphoma. AJ was a normal, strong, healthy 14 year old getting ready to move to back to North Carolina and start high school. He was anxious about it, leaving his buddies, worried that North Carolina football programs would not rank as high as Texas football programs. He started getting sick just before our house hunting trip up there, and when we got back, on Father’s Day 2007, he was admitted to TCH.

 

Within hours we were told he had cancer. He would have to undergo a lengthy treatment program with chemo and radiation, would have to stop sports, would lose his hair and would be very sick from getting better. It was all unreal, we were just a normal family, we had no idea that this whole world here even existed, no idea of the number of kids on 9, no idea of what lay ahead. But we knew how it would end up, AJ would be better, back to his normal self, maybe have to take a year off from football, but no big deal, he had done that before and come back. And, best of all, the words we heard that day were “if you have to be here this one isn’t bad”. Of course, as it turns out no one wants to be here, and no one wants any of them.

 

AJ truly was a remarkable young man. He was born during a blizzard in March 1993, and to this day I remember him not crying and breathing right after being born, and the doctor and nurses rushing around in the delivery room. But after he took that first breath, boy did he breath deep the rest of his life. He lived life. He was always smiling. He loved people, music, playing the guitar, animals, movies, good books. He thought. He had fun; he made people laugh, did the right things, did everything at 110%, and was simply just a joy to be around. He was the love of our lives. To unabashedly steal from his sister Katelyn, “AJ, you would say something to make me laugh or cry or think and I would just stare at you thinking how did you even think of that?” To keep stealing his best buddy Pablo said, “AJ’s character was like the sun: brilliant, golden, and able to light up the whole world”. Jimmy V would be proud of the way AJ lived.

 

Of course he loved sports. He made it all look so easy. The poor kid had to have me coach him in soccer for a few years, and that was his initiation to competition. And he thrived on it. He played for a select soccer team in North Carolina in 2000 when he was like 8 years old, and they won the State Championship and he got a championship gold medal. When we came down here, he started to play for the Classics. He was a play-up that first year, telling me it’s not the size of the dog in the fight it’s the size of the fight in the dog. After a few years of that he went on to basketball and hockey for a couple years, playing on championship teams in both, and scoring the winning goal in sudden death OT in the championship game for his hockey team one year.

 

From there, we move on to 7th grade and…….finally, after throwing him a million passes in the front yard, football. Like his life, his football career was like a bright shooting star. His school has retired his jersey. He was a fast little wide receiver/cornerback and his first year he had touchdowns in his last four games (that’s like scoring 6 goals in each game to you soccer guys). The next year, during preseason practice, on the first day of wearing cleats he caught his spikes in a drill and tore his ACL. But as a testament to his work ethic, within 6 months of surgery for the torn ACL, he came back to run track and was awarded Track Athlete of the Year. He had re-habbed, trained and fought hard to come back. And I knew that his comeback from cancer would be no less amazing.

 

But this disease does not fight fair. It does not let you beat it in a race, it does not let you tackle it and smash it to the ground. It cheats and lies. Throughout his battle with cancer AJ fought. He actually looked forward to going in for chemo and getting sick because he knew that’s what he had to do to win, and he was determined he would win. We were here for nearly 2 months straight before we got to leave the first time, and he had every complication you could imagine. But the kid never complained! And, I think if you go around this room and ask his doctors and nurses, they will tell you that every time, no matter what they did to him, how they poked and prodded him, he said thank you. Thank you Jalane, thank you KP, thank you Pat, thank you Dr. Baxter, thank you Dr. Dryer. Today, on behalf of AJ and his family, I have the chance to say thank you to you all, we know that each of you, and everyone here, did everything they could for our Age.

 

Initially, everything looked great. In July, after only two months of treatment, a scan showed no visible tumor! We only had one more round to go, another 3 weeks. But, again, cancer lied, it was still there. It came back. We tried another chemo, and then another, but nothing seemed to work. AJ knew, I suppose better than we did, what was happening. He knew what his creatin level should be; he knew what his ANC count was. But even then, deep down, we never doubted the outcome. Sure we were scared to death, but this just doesn’t happen to an ordinary family, with two kids, a dog and a cat and a mortgage. But it turns out it does.

 

In November, we started the last chemo regime, and the doctors told us that the chances were very slim that this would work. I would like to thank Pat, Mital, Jalane of TCH, and Connie Prutting my beloved sister-in-law, please stand up each of you, for helping both AJ and us through that difficult day and time. We then started this surreal stretch of coming and going and radiation and finally, hospice. I will never forget him asking me, “Dad, what’s hospice?” Can you imagine?

 

We were able to have, what AJ described as, the best Christmas ever. He loved it. Friends arranged for a white Christmas, snow all over the front yard. I can’t even begin to tell you the meaning of the things he had us get for each other. Because he knew. And we did too. We talked about it, and he was at peace. Again, never complaining, saying only “you have to play the hand you’re dealt Dad” and “I think God needs a right hand man”. Us smiling at each other and shaking our heads as I looked into those blue eyes that Pablo described by saying “just glancing at them could make you hear the ocean”. AJ remained brilliant and elegant to the end. Then, early Saturday morning, January 5th, with us at his side, AJ went to be with our God. To paraphrase Samuel Clemens, who also lost a child, “to describe our pain would be to bankrupt all the languages of all the worlds”. We love him and miss him so.

 

So how do these kids do this? How do they face the day to day fear, the boredom, the pain and the unknown? Well, I have another story to tell you. And it shows how some amazing people devote themselves to helping these amazing kids. First, we have to go back. I am not sure how we met Dr. Pat Thompson frankly, he wasn’t our doctor. But Pat started hanging out with us and became our buddy. He was fighting a losing battle, not against cancer, but against switching AJ from football back to soccer. But we didn’t tell him, he was so sincere and kind. Pat even arranged for a couple soccer players to visit AJ. So that’s when Mr. Craig Wiabel and Mr. Stuart Holden show up one day in AJs room.

 

These two guys razzed AJ about playing football, about his favorite teams, why isn’t he playing soccer and on and on. And AJ just loved it, giving em both some razzing back. He loved Craig’s story of how he was “retired” in the Xbox FIFA game. He sat wide eyed at Stuart’s story of, well let’s just say an incident. It wasn’t two famous soccer players; it was two good guys befriending someone who needed a lift. Two guys giving their time, energy and love to a kid who they didn’t even know. Now, as it turns out, they saw something in AJ and did come to know him. Craig and Stuart both took the time to call or email AJ whenever they could. And each time, AJ’s smile would brighten. AJ’s spirits would soar. Thank you both for your kindness, caring and compassion. Around that time we, like most of Houston, followed the Dynamo on the run to the cup. And celebrated when they beat New England in the championship game.

 

So this happened around mid-November. We were home and hoping and praying that the last chemo regime would be working. But we ended up back at TCH a couple weeks or so before Christmas for some palliative (another of those words you learn) radiation. It was the week Stuart Holden came around and showed the kids the MLS Championship Cup. Stuart was wearing a doctor’s jacket. And just beaming. He was so proud. AJ just lite up when he came in with that thing. It was huge and heavy! I think Stuart and AJ both just marveled at the fact that they were actually holding a professional sport championship cup. I always knew AJ would hold one. He held it up high and kissed it.

 

And then Stuart had to continue on his rounds of making kids feel better. But before he left, he put the cup aside and said, “AJ I want to give you this”. This, this was his championship gold medal that he received on the podium after the 2007 MLS championship game. He placed the medal around AJ’s neck and AJ made me so proud again. He said “Stuart I can’t accept this”. But Stuart would not relent and finally AJ just said “thank you so much”. We then heard how Stuart broke his medal and had to run to his Mom in the stands for a safety pin to fix it so it would look good for all the pictures after the game. So much like something AJ would have to do with his Mom. We laughed and cried. And finally we were left in the room with the championship medal, marveling at it and Stuart both. So now how do you say thank you for something like that? Write a card? Send an email?

 

Well, AJ would probably not like what I figured out to do, but only because he was humble. But one of AJ’s favorite sayings was “you only get what you give” and so, in true AJ spirit………, Stuart, if you would come up here please……..I would like to present you with AJ’s State Championship Gold Medal for Soccer from the year 2000. Please accept this in AJ’s honor. And when you are hurting out there, think of AJ and all these kids and how hard they fight, and keep fighting. When you are tired out there, think of AJ and all these kids, and never give up. From the bottom of my heart, and on behalf of my wife Christi, my daughter Katelyn and my beloved son AJ, thank you man.

 

So, that’s a look at AJ, at this place, at the people who work here, and some of the people who give so freely of themselves to brighten these kid’s days. I could not think of any adjectives to put before any of those nouns. Because there are none that adequately describe any of them.

 

We are all here today to help stop these kinds of stories. Nick’s Team, with your support, will aid in our war against this cheater, against this liar that these kids fight every day. To all the media here today, please, please spread the word. Please, if we end up helping just one child, one family, the world will be a better place.

 

I would like to thank Jeff, Jodie, Nick and Pat for thinking of us today and giving AJ the honor of having his story told.

 

Thank you for allowing me to share this with you today, I am AJ’s Dad.

 

I actually thought of you and your son today, when a little girl came to my door selling cookbooks for Leukemia and Lymphoma. Of course, I had to buy one. Funny, the next thread I read was yours. Stay strong, I know it must be tough.

[BarkLessWagMore]

what a beautiful speech. AJ was a terrific kid put in extraordinary circumstances, and he handled it with more class and grace than most of us display in our lifetimes. God bless you and your family and thanks for sharing his story.

[GoodBye]

That slide show made me cry. So sorry to hear of your loss.

[The Dean]

So sorry for your loss.

[stevewin]

God Bless you, your family, and your son

[In space no one can hear]

Dear ajfluitie:

 

As a man, it is hard to express in words what the relationship between a father and son is, or what it can hope to be.

 

It can be a source of great love, or it can be a source of great pain or lost possibilities.

 

I don't know much, but I do believe that the relationship that God wants for fathers and sons

 

is the bond that you and AJ shared here on Earth and it is a bond that you will share with each other forevermore.

 

Thank you for etching AJ's spirit of life in my heart.

[Beerball]

God bless...

[Nanker]

Sorry for your loss.

[Taro T]

Very sorry to read about your loss. Looks like your boy fought quite a battle.

 

Thank you for sharing the story.