When Destini Cole, 15, took her brother Zach to her English class to talk about his liver cancer, he did what any other self-respecting 7-year-old boy probably would have done.
“He was really hyper, running up and down. He showed them his scar,” Destini said. “He enjoyed it though.”
Zach continues — on his good days, at least — to be every bit the energetic Woodside Elementary second grader family and friends knew before the diagnosis.
But that energy belies the fact that Zach, his three sisters and single mother Roxanne Cole face troubles. Zach’s cancer has cost his mother her job, and the family is struggling to pay bills, car payments and rent.
Their story began in July, when Zach came down with a stomach ache and fever.
“He has always had bowel issues,” Roxanne said. “He was not eating, not feeling all that well.”
When faced with stomach aches, family members often massaged Zach’s stomach. While doing so that day, sister Haven discovered a lump.
The family went to Providence Hospital in Everett, where an ultrasound showed a six-inch mass in Zach’s liver.
“They don’t say ‘tumor,’” Roxanne said. “(But) it hit me like a rock. I knew it was cancer.”
The rare liver cancer took 10 days to diagnose. What followed was four rounds of chemotherapy in the hospital. Recently, Zach had surgery that took out more than 70 percent of his liver. Now he faces six more months of chemotherapy.
Money is another problem.
“When you’re in the hospital, you’re not coming to work,” Roxanne said. “I didn’t leave Zach.”
As a result, Roxanne lost her job as a bartender in Everett. Then Zach’s father quit his job and got a new job that paid less. The family’s income from alimony went down by $5,000, she said.
The family also could lose its home. The owners of the Everett house they rent told Roxanne that if they can’t pay the rent, they will let them out of their lease, Roxanne said. The rent is $1,500 a month.
A local real estate agency is trying to sponsor the family for two month’s rent.
Moving may not physically be an option, since many older houses and apartments have things that could cause Zach problems, Roxanne said.
She’s also trying to raise money to hire a lawyer to work out the alimony problems, she said.
When the family gathered in their home recently to tell their story, a large Christmas tree stood by the window.
Zach pulled down candy canes from the branches and lined them up on a bead string on the lowest branch, ignoring his sisters’ urgings to leave the candy canes alone.
He wore jeans and a Spider-Man T-shirt, with a feeding tube held to his face with a cartoon Band-Aid.
“When he got down to 51 pounds, they told me he had to have the feeding tube,” Roxanne said. “He has ripped it out, mostly by playing.”
A Halloween sword was one culprit.
“Mostly every holiday it comes out,” Zach said.
Then there are the quirky results of chemotherapy, like altered taste buds and an addiction to steak and steak sauce, Roxanne said.
As his mother talked, Zach broke in now and then.
“Can we go places today?” he said. “I’m really hyper.”
The cancer has severely limited the family’s mobility, Roxanne said. After Zachs’ chemotherapy treatments his immunity was too low to go out in public. Zach also can get exhausted.
Finally, Zach has a lot of physical pain.
“He has no control over what happens to him,” Roxanne said. “Some of the stuff is pretty horrendous.”
Emotionally, Zach has his ups and downs. He’s ranged from anger and asking why this is happening to him to roaring around the hospital ward gleefully on a small bike.
Mostly he’s handling it very well, Roxanne said.
Zach’s cancer is stage four, one of the latter stages of cancer, but the doctors haven’t given any estimate of his chances for survival. The cancer seems not to have spread to other parts of the body, though cancer cells may be hiding out, Roxanne said.
“He wants to fight it, he wants to live,” she said.
Woodside Elementary staff, which organized a spaghetti feed and auction to raise money for the Coles, have been very supportive, as have many others locally, Roxanne said. Alfy’s Pizza in Silver Lake donated the spaghetti dinners for the Woodside event.
Salli Smith, secretary at Woodside, has known the Coles for four years and seen their struggles.
“Zach is one of those kids that walks into your heart and you can’t get them back out,” she said. “He’s rambunctious. He does have a lot of energy, and a bit of an impish side.”
Another positive, besides community support, is the newfound closeness of the family.
“When (his sisters before) may have thought Zach was being a pain in the butt – (now) they value things differently,” Roxanne said. “My kids have learned so much from all this, things I couldn’t teach them: What family is.”
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