Jack was sixteen and a half when his left knee started hurting.
He thought it was from basketball. So did we. We bought him a knee brace from the drugstore and told him to ice it.
It didn’t get better. It got worse. He started limping.
In March, his doctor ordered an X-ray.
Two days later, we were sitting in that little gray room at Nationwide Children’s Hospital. Daniel and Jack and me.
The oncologist was a kind woman named Dr. Patel. She had a box of Kleenex on the table before we even sat down.
That’s how I knew.
Osteosarcoma. Bone cancer. In his left femur. And there were spots on his lungs.
Jack sat there and listened to every word. He asked smart questions. He asked about survival rates. He asked about the chemo drugs by name.
On the drive home, he didn’t say anything for a long time.
Then he said, “Well. At least I don’t have to take the SATs.”
Daniel laughed so hard he had to pull the car over.
Then he put his head down on the steering wheel and sobbed.
Jack reached up from the back seat and put his hand on his dad’s shoulder.
“It’s okay, Dad,” he said. “It’s okay.”
He was sixteen. He was comforting us.
That was Jack.
The next fourteen months were the hardest of our lives.
Chemo. Surgery to remove part of his femur. More chemo. Radiation for the spots on his lungs. Hospital stays that lasted weeks.
Daniel and I both work at hospitals. He’s an ER nurse at Riverside. I’m a respiratory therapist at Mount Carmel. We had to keep our jobs. We needed the insurance.
So we started working opposite shifts. Daniel worked nights. I worked days. One of us was always at the hospital with Jack. The other one was sleeping. Or driving Lily to school. Or sitting in the hospital billing office on hold with the insurance company.
We barely saw each other for a year.
And through all of it, there was Theo.
Sophia Rivers is an experienced News Content Editor with a sharp eye for detail and a passion for delivering accurate and engaging news stories. At TheArchivists, she specializes in curating, editing, and presenting news content that informs and resonates with a global audience.
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