Benny

Oh man, you guys.  The Benny saga has just gone on and on, and every time I think it’s a good time for an update, he takes another twist in the road and I feel too sick and sad about it all to write anything.

Benny is the little boy from Jack’s class who has leukemia, the one for whom we had the blood drive at the law school.  Benny went into the hospital for a bone marrow transplant in mid-March, and has been in there since then.  His pattern seems to be this: spiral spectacularly downward, until I (we all) begin to brace ourselves for the bad news.  Stabilize.  Stay stable but critical for way too long – days, weeks.  Start to slowly creep back up to health.  Encounter another bad turn, spiral spectacularly downward, and repeat.

First he had a great response to the bone marrow transplant.  Then his liver began to malfunction (a usually deadly side effect of transplants), he was put on dialysis, given a breathing tube, experiencing organ failure.  He was put in a coma for a while and just lay there, stagnant, getting neither worse nor better for several weeks.  Then, slowly but surely, he started to improve.  The breathing tube came out.  They ramped back his dialysis.  Then his kidneys took another dive, breathing tube went back in, back into a coma.  Then he started to climb out of that hole, and was reading books and talking to his mom again, and then blammo, he’s got freaking pneumonia.  BACK into a medically induced coma, back on a breathing tube, no response to meds, fluid on his lungs, a total mess again.  About a week of no response to the meds for this, and now he’s slowly improving again, reading books with mom again, about to have the tube pulled out again.  His mother believes he’ll be out of the hospital in June.  I hope she is right.  She’s been sleeping in that hospital with him for two months.  It’s time for them all to go home.

The super double bonus fun news is that he is totally cancer free at this point.  The treatments were very effective at wiping out cancer – unfortunately, they seem to have wiped out a lot of Benny’s organs, too.  Such is the nature of cancer treatment – walking a fine line between killing you and saving you.  I’m just really glad this kid is still here.  I read his mother’s updates with trepidation, every day, but I have a lot of hope that this will be his last major dip, and that’s he’s really on his way to full health and being back at home again soon.