Part Four

Thank you all for your interest and comments on Matthew's story. It is one we have been longing to tell for a long time. We just haven't had many chances to do so.

Part Four

The surgery was a success and Matthew became an instant celebrity.
He was only the 7th person in the United States to have this surgery. He was one of even less who survived it. He was in all the Medical Journals. His case is still talked about in the teaching curriculum at Vandy.

Everything was fine for a while. Matthew was finally starting to grow. You can only imagine how truly thankful and happy we were.

But everything was not fine. We noticed that Matthew didn’t seem to have much energy. This little fireball who never sat still was now having trouble even walking from the car to the house. So, it was back to the doctors.

When the blood work came back the results were not good. Matthew's Red Blood Count was dangerously low. Test revealed that his bone marrow had stopped producing Red blood cells.
As far as we knew this could only mean one thing.

In a perfect world, the words “Pediatric Oncologist” would never be needed. But this world is far from perfect.

I remember walking into the office. This time I was mad! I was mad at God. How could he allow such a thing? After all we had been through – why me?
Then I looked around the room at the faces and the bald heads of the kids waiting there to see the doctor. I looked into the tired desperate eyes of the parents. Then I started thinking, “Why not me?” Why do me and my family deserve God’s blessing and protection and these people do not?

It wasn’t cancer. It ended up being a simple thing that the doctors had simply over looked. The part of Matthew’s intestines that absorbed B12, (The nutrient needed for your bone marrow to make RBCs) was missing. He just had to have a few shot each month to fix it. I remember feeling so guilty walking back out of that office through the crowd of parents and kids that were not going to hear such good news.