Mum....Son..... Fight cancer together

For the Perry family, Christmas this year will be a
little different. The festivities will not be held at grandma’s
house, or at home in Nashua, N.H., but in a
hospital room where Owen Perry, 12, is receiving
treatment for acute myeloid leukemia. By the middle of January, Owen, a 7th grader
with a fondness for practical jokes, will have
completed his fourth and final round of
chemotherapy. With his doctor’s permission,
Owen will return home, where the family plans to
celebrate a second Christmas by cooking a big feast and opening more presents. “We’ll make a new tradition for just this year,”
his mother Karen told TODAY.com. That celebration will also mark an important
moment for Karen. In July, a few months before
her son was diagnosed with leukemia, Karen, 48,
was told that she had ovarian cancer. She has just
finished 18 weeks of chemotherapy. Related: Mom, daughter face double cancer
diagnosis together Though Karen must wait three months to learn
whether her cancer is in remission, Owen’s
expected return home in January will finally bring
the family of four together under one roof again
for the first time in several months. Karen and her husband Brian, 48, have taken turns
driving an hour every day to stay with Owen at the
Dana-Farber/Boston Children's Cancer and Blood
Disorders Center, where he is receiving in-patient
treatment. “Everything has basically been turned upside
down,” said Brian. That includes the life of the
couple’s 13-year-old daughter Julia, who has
sometimes stayed with friends and family when
Brian and Karen couldn’t be home. There are many things the family, whose story was first reported by the Nashua Telegraph, misses about their lives before cancer. Owen
wishes he could play more video games, eat lunch
with his friends at school, and get back on the
basketball court with his team. Karen longs to
play golf and join her friends for a girls' night out.
Brian would love for the family to gather around the dinner table again. Though it's rare for one immediate family to
receive two cancer diagnoses, it does happen
occasionally, said Dr. Anna Muriel, a psychiatrist
at Dana-Farber/Boston Children's Cancer and
Blood Disorders Center. And while just one
diagnosis can strain and exhaust a family, when both a parent and child are undergoing treatment,
it creates a unique challenge. The parent, Muriel said, has to “balance their own
vulnerability and their real drive to take of their
child.” For the Perrys, the diagnoses came just weeks
apart. When they learned of Karen’s diagnosis,
they were shocked. And when Owen’s diagnosis
followed, the family found itself in denial. “My
reaction was, ‘Wow, what’s around the corner
now?’” Brian said. Many families dealing with a cancer diagnosis,
Muriel said, feel both the threat of loss and a new
strength and closeness. To help patients and their
loved ones understand these emotions, hospitals
frequently offer counseling and support groups. While Owen regularly meets with a social worker,
the Perrys have yet to take advantage of therapy
services. Instead, they’ve relied on family and
friends for support — something that Karen said
was difficult to do at first. “People are always asking to help,” she said.
“The hardest thing was to accept that help. You
think you can do it all on your own.” But their loved ones have stepped in, preparing
meals and helping to coordinate Julia’s schedule.
One friend who couldn’t cook gave the family a
parking pass for the hospital garage, which saved
them both money and time. Their families hosted
two separate benefits, raising several thousand dollars to help pay for hospital bills and lost
income, since Karen and Brian had taken leave
from their jobs. And one night last week, the
Perrys returned home to find that neighbors had
decorated their two-story colonial home with
Christmas lights and ornaments. “Acts like that make you think there’s a lot of
great people out there in the world,” said Brian. Now the Perrys are looking forward to the promise
of January, and the possibility of helping families
like theirs by raising awareness about ovarian and
pediatric cancer. “It’s nice to know people have gone through what
you’ve gone through and they’re alive,” Karen
said. “Cancer is not a death sentence anymore.” The experience has also given them a new
perspective on balancing all of life’s demands.
When they return to a “new normal” next year,
Karen said, they might not be working as long or
as hard, and that would be fine. “You put your family on hold to better your
career,” Brian said. “Now you know, what’s
better than family? Nothing.”