Friday, November 18, 2005
-- Don Colburn
When you're 4 years old and fighting cancer, it helps to have a loyal stuffed animal with a good memory and a hero who can crawl up a wall. Ask Elijah Jones. He's peeking out from under a blue Spider-Man cap and sticking his tongue out at the doctor -- part of a weekly checkup at the Legacy Emanuel Children's Hospital clinic. Beside him on the examining table sits a fuzzy, well-worn, greenish-gray elephant.
"We don't go anywhere without Elephant," says Elijah's mom, Trisha Jones.
This past summer, Elijah suddenly lost energy and appetite. Purplish bruises welled up for no apparent reason on his legs and back. His skin turned pale, then yellowish.
The Jones family's world turned upside down on Aug. 8. That's when doctors confirmed that Elijah had acute lymphoblastic leukemia, the most common cancer in children. Leukemia is a "liquid tumor" of the blood that starts in the bone marrow and crowds out normal blood cells.
Elijah calls it "you-KEEM-ya." His jargon-free summary: "It makes you sick and you get a lot of bruises."
He's three months into a three-year wall-crawl of chemotherapy. Some comes in pills he takes at home, mixed with Hershey's dark chocolate sauce. Some is delivered intravenously at the clinic through a valve implanted in his chest.
Doctors say Elijah responded well to the high initial drug dose and has an 80 percent to 90 percent chance of long-term survival. But statistical odds, based on group results, are hard to apply to individual patients.
"The thing to remember about those numbers," says Gina Volonte, pediatric cancer social worker at Legacy Emanuel, "is that for him, it's all or nothing."
The anticancer drugs also lower Elijah's blood counts, sapping his immune system's ability to fight off germs, including colds and flu.
A cancer diagnosis in a child triggers "a whole shift of what normalcy is" for everyone in the family, Volonte says. Often, kids adapt better than adults.
Elijah lives with his parents and two sisters -- Makayla, 7, and Isabella, 2 -- in Milwaukie. Their house needs work, including insulation and a new water heater.
Mounting medical bills have put those repairs on hold. In 10 weeks, the charges for Elijah's care surpassed $70,000. While most of that sum is covered by insurance through Cory Jones' job with a mortgage firm, the premium takes a nearly $800 monthly bite out his paycheck, and the policy doesn't cover every charge.
The Joneses have paid about $3,000 out of pocket for deductibles, co-pays and other uncovered charges.
Leukemia, Trisha Jones says, "is something you never budget for."