Companions in Courage (11 page)

When Aaron was diagnosed, the doctor told his parents he would be their source of strength. You would think it would be the
other way around, but the doctor was right. When it became apparent that Aaron wasn’t going to make it, his parents tried
their best to be strong and positive and to keep their devastation and grief to themselves. Who helped them with the reality
that he would soon be saying good-bye? Aaron.

“He is our hero. His strength and courage enable my husband and I and Aaron’s brother, Johnny, to get through this together,”
was what his mom, Michele, said. “It seemed like the whole world was his friend. He never complained about his pain and he
was always happy.”

Aaron spent three months at Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center in New York City. After that stay, he and his family made
monthly trips to continue his care. Even though those treatments left him disoriented and weak, his primary concern was getting
back on the basketball court with the St. Joseph’s team in Buffalo.

Aaron loved and thrived on athletic competition. He started playing soccer when he was four years old, in the Delaware Soccer
League. He was captain of the St. Joe’s freshman soccer team. In 1998 he played guard on the St. Joe’s junior varsity basketball
team. The last year of Aaron’s life, he would come back from his treatments in New York and head for practice with the varsity.
He was so weak he could hardly get up and down the court, but his presence and determination inspired his teammates and the
whole St. Joe’s community.

Aaron Graves was not only an athlete, he was a scholar. He made the honor roll at the first marking period a few months before
he passed away. Aaron loved art and music. He attended the Western New York Academy of Dance for ten years and became an excellent
tap dancer. Before and after his treatment, Aaron painted an acrylic reproduction of Monet’s
Regatta at Sainte-Addresse
. After his death Aaron’s family donated his painting to St. Joe’s to raise scholarship money for the school. His father,
Eugene Graves, was the highest bidder, and the painting now hangs in the Graveses’ living room.

In addition to athletics, academics, and his extracurricular activities, Aaron made his mark in his community. When he wasn’t
delivering the
Buffalo News
to his neighborhood, he volunteered with the Buffalo Police Department, where his mom works, the Kiwanis Club, and the Parkside
Community Association, or counseled kids at the Parkside Summer Arts Program. He did his counseling despite a broken arm,
the result of bones made brittle by his cancer treatment.

Even though Aaron was fighting for his own life, he never stopped reaching out to help those around him. “He was a courageous
young man who never complained and was always polite and respectful. He was one of a kind. He had a drive for life,” says
Police Commissioner Rocco Diina.

Aaron died as he lived—giving life and energy to those around him. Eighteen hundred people attended Aaron’s funeral to celebrate
his life. The police department in parade dress, the singers from St. Joseph Collegiate Institute, his church, and his family
and friends said good-bye to a young man whose influence touched the lives of many people.

His family still mourns his loss. The Buffalo community and the student body of St. Joe’s miss his energy and up-beat take
on life and death. Yet they feel his presence, they see his smile, they hear his words, and they remember his attitude. An
anonymous scholarship has been established at St. Joe’s in Aaron’s honor.

The two stipulations: academic achievement and community service. That’s Aaron’s legacy. It connects us with him and his memory,
and those thoughts and feelings will never die.

K
athy Waldo might have spent her days staring at the walls and wondering what an active life is all about.

But no walls hemmed her in. If she observed any boundaries, respected any barriers, they were the ones a hockey rink provides
naturally. Kathy Waldo crashed into the boards many a time but never hit the wall.

She was the first girl to play on her high school’s boys’ hockey team and the first to be named captain. She went on to star
at Northeastern University. She’s one of my Companions in Courage, but her ever-present companion was, and is, cystic fibrosis.

Two months after she was born in Cross Plains, Wisconsin, some twenty years ago, her parents, Joe and Maureen Waldo, brought
their little girl to the doctor’s office because of lingering congestion in her chest. Neither the diagnosis nor the prognosis
raised anyone’s spirits.

“Kathy would have to spend her life in and out of hospitals,” her mother remembers the doctors saying. “They told us our daughter
would live until she was eighteen, maybe twenty, and that would be that.”

The symptoms were ugly. People with CF suffer from chronic lung infections and digestive disorders. A sticky, thick mucus,
which is difficult to remove and promotes bacterial infection, eats away at the lung tissue. Excessive appetite along with
poor weight gain often adds to the frailty of an already vulnerable immune system. The coughing spells, frightening infections,
and just plain exhaustion often lead to frequent hospitalizations and continuous use of antibiotics, enzyme supplements, and
other medications.

Joe and Maureen spent many nights considering possible courses of action. They elected to take a risk and be different. “We
decided to take our own approach. She was not going to grow up as a patient,” Maureen says. “She deserved more.”

They figured a sedentary existence in a hospital room wouldn’t help the breathing. They believed that running and playing
and literally gulping in the fresh air would be so much more natural and healing. So whenever one of those deep, racking spells
of coughing hit, Joe would make Kathy go out and run around the block. They encouraged David, her older brother, to include
Kathy in football, baseball, and basketball.

Maybe, just maybe, there was something in the air. At three years of age, Kathy followed David onto the ice to play hockey.
Picture this little tyke strapping on skates and joining a boys’ Midget team for four- to seven-year-olds. Guess what? She
was great. And so was this self-developed therapy.

“Nothing’s better for me than hockey,” Kathy says. “The skating makes you work really hard, and then you take in the cold
air from the ice. It opens your lungs up and keeps things moving in your body.”

Remember those warnings of a short life marred by hospital stays? Kathy was only hospitalized twice by the time she was eighteen.

Maybe it sounds easy because it worked so well. But I call Kathy a Companion in Courage because all of this was so much harder
and more treacherous than it seems. Every time she coughs or gets a cold, or is even near someone with a cold, a warning light
flashes in her mind. She must be scrupulous in safeguarding her precious health. She must maintain her regimen of medication
to continually break down the mucus buildup in her lungs. Infection still comes all too easily.

After her freshman year at Northeastern, surgery to repair a shoulder injury went well, but complications—a lung infection—followed.
She had to fight off more severe consequences with intravenous fluids and constant trips back and forth from the hospital.

“It reminds me of what can happen,” says Kathy. “It was horrible.”

And yet it also puts her in mind of how awful a quiet, inactive existence would be. Her motto is simple: Be tough. She has
a life. She’s going to live it.

“People who sit around and complain about life—that sucks,” Kathy says. “I know I have a disease that’s technically supposed
to give me a shorter life span. But why should I think about dying? I’ve beaten the odds, and I’ll continue to beat the odds.”

That’s why Kathy Waldo is not only a Companion in Courage but a breath of fresh air.

J
ohn Cullen absorbed many hits as a star center for the Pittsburgh Penguins and the Tampa Bay Lightning, but none flattened
him like the news he received in the spring of 1997.

He went to the doctor to check out his flulike symptoms and the X-ray/CT scan showed a baseball-size tumor in his chest. He
had non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma. But he was a picture of perfect health and superb conditioning. NonHodgkin’s lymphoma? Impossible!

John recovered from the shock of the medical findings and began a rigorous regimen of chemotherapy and exercise. “He lost
his hair and had pain from the chemo, but he worked right through it,” said John McCortney, his personal trainer. “He ran,
lifted, everything. He got stronger.”

The tumor disappeared in September 1997, but John’s body still housed cancer cells and doctors told him he had a fifty-fifty
chance of survival. His season was finished without ever beginning, but his number 12 took the ice in every game, worn on
the uniform sleeves of his teammates in tribute to their valiant colleague.

While his teammates battled on the ice, Cullen fought for his life off it. John began another round of chemotherapy and radiation.
He had his weights and a stationary bike brought to his room. Even though he was too weak to use them, they provided incentive
and gave him the motivation to fight this terrible disease.

In early October a nurse and Cullen’s wife, Valerie, were wheeling him to a radiation treatment when, suddenly and without
warning, he slumped in his chair. The nurse checked his pulse and found nothing. His heart had stopped beating. Doctors heard
her screaming, “Code Blue! Code Blue!” and rushed to revive John with a defibrillator.

Sure, it sounds like one of those television shows. But if there was going to be a happy ending, no one could imagine it.
Not long after cheating death, John needed a bone marrow transplant. His marrow had to be harvested, cleansed, and reintroduced.
Even though on the second day of the procedure he developed pericarditis, an inflammation of the sac surrounding the heart,
John battled the odds and won.

When John and Valerie returned to Tampa that winter, he was a shell of his former self, frail and weak. He had trouble keeping
up with Valerie and his daughter, Kennedy, when they took short walks together. But John began to get his strength back. In
April he returned to Boston for a checkup and received good news—the cancer was no longer living in his body. He came back
to Tampa with one objective: to play hockey for the Tampa Bay Lightning.

When he began training camp that next autumn, John didn’t know what to expect. He started camp tentatively, giving himself
time to get his legs back and let his body adjust to a different kind of battle—hockey in the NHL. He knew he had recovered
his touch when he scored the winning goal in the last exhibition game of the season. It came against the best goalie in the
league, Dominik Hasek of the Buffalo Sabres.

On October 6, 1998, John Cullen took the opening face-off in the Lightning’s first game of the season.

“Exciting days! But you don’t go through a cancer ordeal, with all the treatment, without changing. I’ve changed spiritually,
physically, and emotionally. I don’t want sympathy. It will weaken me,” John said.

Well, how about a little admiration? No professional athlete had returned to play after undergoing a bone marrow transplant.

Cullen didn’t play much in the next three Tampa games and then sat the next four. His coach, Jacques Demers, whose wife was
battling cancer, approached John about taking an assistant coaching position with the team. John, who was not satisfied with
his comeback progress, thanked Jacques for the offer but decided instead to play for Tampa’s IHL team, the Cleveland Lumberjacks.

He got off to a quick start, but he also came down with the flu and bronchitis, and a nagging fear arose that his body could
not endure this rigorous game anymore. John had to face the reality that the bone-rattling checks of professional hockey were
too much for him. He returned home to discuss his future with his wife and their friends.

On November 27 John Cullen retired and accepted the job as assistant coach of the Tampa Bay Lightning. The last twenty months
of his life had scaled the heights and plumbed the depths and left him with a lesson learned.

“Anytime a person plays a game as long as I have it is difficult to say good-bye. I know I have made the right decision,”
he said. “It is time to be realistic and move on to a new challenge. My goal was to make it back, and I achieved that. I am
grateful to the many people who supported and encouraged me. I went through a lot. I went through extensive cancer treatment
and survived. Now I want to get my story out to give hope to people who are battling cancer.”

He set too modest a goal. He gives hope to us all.

O
ne in a thousand people is stricken with multiple sclerosis. Sometimes that person turns out to be one in a million.

In 1970, Jimmie Heuga, one of the first American men to be awarded an Olympic Alpine skiing medal, was diagnosed with this
progressive, crippling disease of the immune system, in which the myelin sheath that covers nerve endings becomes scarred
and the brain’s instructions can no longer get to parts of the body.

Just as the disease slowly takes away bits of your life, so will the people sworn to protect you. Not out of meanness, but
out of love and caring. So the doctors ordered the bronze medalist in the 1964 Innsbruck Winter Games to refrain from any
athletic activity. The sport in which he excelled had become too dangerous, and his body couldn’t handle the stress of training.

How in the world does a great athlete take a blow like that?

I have been on injured reserve for periods of time and can hardly describe the frustration of not competing. I know I couldn’t
wait to return to the ice and I probably drove everybody around me crazy until I could.