Brady was diagnosed with Acute Myeloid Leukemia on 12/24/2014. He had just turned two years old on December 20, and we found ourselves hearing the words “Your son has cancer” just a couple days later. It completely changed our world. Brady’s subtype was M7 which made his type of leukemia even harder to treat because AML is usually considered an adult cancer and then the subtype M7 usually went after people with Down Syndrome, which our son did not have. At one point I found myself wishing that Brady had down syndrome because getting him cured would not have been so hard. Brady received his first round of chemo on Christmas Day 2014. He went through 100’s of bone marrow biopsies, spinal taps, surgeries, blood and platelet transfusions, was given multiple different types of chemo, was tattooed for radiation treatment that he never ended up getting, and went to multiple different hospitals for 18 months trying to find a cure for him. During this time he showed us all how to live.
Brady would walk into any room and command attention and loved talking to anyone and everyone, whether he knew them or not! He loved his doctors and nurses and his morning routine would always include him throwing open his door and yelling “HELLLLLWWWOOOO WADIES!” to the nursing staff and normally would run to the first nurse he saw and strike up a conversation. Brady loved playing pick-up games of soccer with his doctors and nurses while he was inpatient and almost always had a pole attached to him with chemo or meds pouring into his body as he ran around kicking the soccer ball. He had the best one-line comebacks of anyone I have ever met and would constantly keep us laughing even when all we wanted to do was cry. Brady was a Daddy’s boy and wanted to do all things his Daddy would do including dancing, cleaning our hospital room, and loved riding his bike and John Deere tractor while Daddy walked with him. He was his Momma’s world and the best snuggle buddy and loved his 2 big sisters hard! Brady just loved life and wanted to grow up so badly.
However, on June 10, 2016, our beautiful boy laid between his Daddy and Mommy and took his last breath. He was just 3 years old. We have heard so many times that childhood cancer is rare and in the same breath, we hear more and more children that are being diagnosed with cancer and dying each day because of the side-effects of treatment or because we simply do not know how to cure them. Childhood cancer is NOT rare, the only thing rare about it is the treatments that are available to treat our kids. We need more treatments available, we need more funding to be able to find cures, and most importantly we need our kids to live! This is why CureSearch is so important because it helps to increase the funding and treatment options available so one day no parent will have to hold their child’s dead body in their arms and say goodbye.
Our team page, BradyStrong, is located here: http://www.curesearchevents.org/site/TR/CureSearchWalk/CureSeachWalk?team\_id=4734&pg=team&fr\_id=2075
