Bruce Prescott's Journal Entry, November 30, 2005

Four years ago today, November 30, 2001, it was a Friday. Faith and I took Shelby to Scottish Rite Children’s Hospital for a CT scan. I really didn’t know what they were looking for or what they were going to find. She had been through blood test after blood test, x-rays, and antibiotics, but still her low-grade fever persisted. I just knew it had to be something simple. They’d find the problem, give us a different antibiotic and we’d be on our way.

We had to leave our house at 5:45 to fight Atlanta traffic. To be honest with you, I don’t remember what we did with our son Steven that morning. He was taken care of though. We just took Shelby straight out of bed and into the car seat. I didn’t understand why we had to be there at 7:00am for a 9:00 appointment. The nurse came out and asked what flavor juice she wanted her contrast in. I had no clue. What is contrast? Faith said, “Apple juice.” The nurse came back with a 12 oz. cup of juice with pen markings on the side showing the time she needed to have drank that amount. She said Shelby had to drink all of this over the next hour, but not too fast; when she finished that cup, let her know, and she’d bring the second one. Shelby took one sip and cried that she didn’t like it and refused to drink any more. “A second one??” I thought. “We can’t even get one sip out of the first one!” I was getting annoyed. Shelby eventually drank almost all of the contrast. She looked miserable. Then the nurse returned and brought us back to the “sedation bay.” Now after they tortured her with the contrast, they were going to put in an IV. It wasn’t even 9:30 yet, and my migraine began to come on. Faith cried when Shelby screamed as they poked her with the needle. They couldn’t find the vein so they poked her again. I started to get teary eyed by this point. Finally they got it, and Shelby calmed down. We waited for what seemed like another hour and then the nurse came in to give her the sedation med. After another 20 minutes or so, she was asleep and they brought us back to the scan room. I put Shelby on the long thin table. The room was dark, and everyone whispered so we could keep Shelby asleep. She needed to remain perfectly still. For a 3 year-old this was almost impossible. Thus, the sedation.

They put Faith and I into lead aprons and told us we could stay in there, but we had to keep our backs to the wall. We stood back and watched the machine slide Shelby through this big huge donut-shaped contraption. Then the “Danger-Radiation” light came on. The scan was underway. Until now, I had not been scared, just annoyed at the whole process. But, it suddenly hit me that this could be serious. I looked at Shelby’s little body lying on that table and held back the tears. I couldn’t let Faith know that I was weak. I had to be strong. The tech came out and said they were done, but we needed to wait for the doctor to look at the film quickly and make sure it was clear. We waited about 15 minutes, maybe more, then the tech came back out and said the doctor wanted another scan at a different angle. My heart sank. This isn’t right. One scan should be enough. The light came on again and the techs huddled around their computer screen with looks of concern.

They took us back to the sedation bay to let Shelby sleep off the anesthesia. Faith and I were quiet. We were both worried, but also very tired. We watched an IT guy work on a printer across the hall for about an hour. My headache was full blown by now. One of the nurses came over about noon and told Faith that Shelby’s pediatrician, Dr. Green, was on the phone. I had remembered that Faith had told her to call us on the phone when the results came in rather than waiting for us to make an appointment. She wanted to know right then. I could see Faith’s back to me from down the hall, but I couldn’t see her face. A few minutes later Faith came down the hall. I could see tears in her eyes and she was pale. She didn’t even look at me as she said, “Dr. Green wants to talk to you.” Something was definitely wrong. I walk down the hall to the nurses’ station. The nurse handed me the phone. She looked at me as to say, “I’m sorry.” Then she hung her head and walked away. I said, “Hello.” Dr. Green answered, “Mr. Prescott, this is Candace Green. I wanted to be sure someone was with Faith. I’m sorry to tell you that they have found a tumor on Shelby’s adrenal gland over the left kidney.” There was a long pause as I took this in. At first, I thought maybe it was benign so I said, “OK.” I paused again. She said, “Mr. Prescott? Are you OK?” I said, “Yes. Is it malignant?” She answered, “I’m afraid so. Are you sure you’re OK?” The emotion hit me. I could barely get out the words. “I’m OK.” Dr. Green said that an oncologist would be down to talk to us shortly and that Shelby was going to be admitted to the hospital. I again could barely get the words out “OK” Dr. Green said, “Mr. Prescott, I’m so sorry. Please call me if I can help you with anything…. I need to know if you are OK.” I finally got it together and said “Yes, I’ll be fine. Thank you for calling us. Goodbye.” I think I actually hung up on her.

As I walked back to Faith and Shelby, I could feel my legs getting weak. Faith sat behind the curtain that separated us from the other sedation bays. The lights were out and she was holding Shelby. Shelby was still asleep. I knelt down beside them and put my arms around both of them and we started to cry. My headache was gone now, but only because my whole body was numb. Faith looked at me with tears streaming down her face and asked, “What are we going to do?” I just put my head down and shook it back and forth. “I don’t know.” We waited. We could hear other kids crying as the nurses poked them with needles to get their IV’s in. Every once and a while a nurse would walk by and look at us sadly. I went to the restroom and while I was out I thought I should call someone. I wasn’t sure who to call first. I think I called my boss first because I had to tell him that I wouldn’t be back into work today. “As a matter a fact,” I told him, “I don’t know when I’ll be back.” I wanted to call my dad, but he was on a cruise ship somewhere near the Panama Canal. It would be almost 2 weeks later when I was able to tell him. I called my brothers; I called my uncle. After that, I don’t remember who I called. I went back to the sedation bay. We waited some more. The guy was still working on the copier, but a nurse had come by and closed the curtain to that room, trying to be respectful of us. They all seemed to be in shock that we were told the results right there in the sedation bay. Apparently this was not normal procedure. Little did I know that we would come to know these nurses very well over the next 3 years. They were our friends and took good care of Shelby. Right then though, I wished I had never seen them.

Two hours after Dr. Green had called, Dr. Davis, the Director of Medicine for the Aflac Pediatric Cancer Center at the time, finally came by with a questionnaire a mile long. How many people were in our household? How many children? Is it a single family home? Has Shelby ever had any serious illnesses? What about a history of cancer in your families? There it was the “C” word. Along with that question came my migraine rushing back with a vengeance. Faith was completely annoyed by the questions. She didn’t want questions, she wanted answers. What was this? How are we going to get rid of it? Why are we seeing an oncologist if we haven’t had a biopsy done yet? I was so ignorant of cancer that I didn’t even know that that was a legitimate question.

Finally, Dr. Davis said, “We still have some test to run, but we are pretty sure this is Neuroblastoma.” I thought, “Neuro-what?” About that time the chaplain came to see us. Her name was Robbye. She was our guide through the rest of the day. She stayed with us while we were escorted to Shelby’s room. Several nurse-type people were in and out of the room doing various things. I didn’t know who was a nurse, a tech, a P.A, a doctor. They all looked alike to me. Robbye came back in with a few goodies for Shelby. One thing was a fleece blanket with Teddy Bears all over it. That blanket is now folded and hanging over a rocking chair in Shelby’s room at this very minute.

Soon people began to show up as the news spread. Faith’s sister, my aunt and uncle, Faith’s dad drove all the way from Florida; Steven was there, but I don’t remember how he got there. Shelby was now awake and she was doing fine. She was now hooked up to fluids and she and Steven were playing with the TV. Somehow in all of this, we managed to laugh a few times. I sat on the couch and tried to forget about my migraine. It was about 10:00 p.m. by now, and it was still there. My aunt just happened to have a sample of her migraine medication that her doctor had given her, so I tried it. It went away within about 15 minutes.

The rest of that day (what was left of it) is a complete blur. We met Dr. George the next day, and he became Shelby’s oncologist, eventually replacing Dr. Davis as the Medical Director of the Aflac Center at Scottish Rite. He also became our friend. As the days went by, we learned more about Shelby’s diagnosis. It was Stage IV. She had a primary tumor about the size of an egg that would be “resected” (a term that I didn’t know meant “removed surgically”) after her fourth round of chemo, and she would have two more rounds after that. We would have to take her to Johns Hopkins in Baltimore for a bone marrow transplant that would keep her in the hospital near death for 6-7 weeks. She would go through several different types of scans and a biopsy that would reveal metastases scattered through out her body. Dr. Davis had told Faith that he wished he could say it was Leukemia. Faith asked him what we should pray for. He said, “A miracle.” We were told that there was about a 60 percent survival rate for Neuroblastoma. We later found out that 60 percent was the statistic for all stages of Neuroblastoma. The actual survival rate for Stage IV was more like 25 percent. The whole process would take about a year, and we had better hope that we get rid of it the first time around, because the chance of survival after a relapse was about 5 percent.

I’m sorry that this is so long, but I wanted to tell the story of the day that changed our lives forever. We found that all the clichés you hear about life are true. It’s not a bowl of cherries. It can be cruel. But with rain comes rainbows, and you can make lemonade out of lemons. We found that Shelby was loved by many. We found that we are loved by many. We found that God doesn’t cause pain, but he puts people around you to give you the strength to deal with the pain. (It’s up to you to see Him through those people and accept the strength He gives you through them. Faith made sure that we lived our lives as normal as possible. I thank her for that. It made a tremendous difference in Steven and Shelby’s way of coping with cancer. We have heard it said over and over again about someone dying of cancer, that they “lost their battle,” but we refuse to see it that way. Cancer may have taken the life out of Shelby’s body, but it couldn’t put a dent in her spirit which continues to touch our lives and the lives of people we may never know. Our relationships with our families and friends have become stronger. We have met many new friends that we have come to love and rely on.

We love you, Shelby and miss you more than you know, but we know that we are better people having known you and experienced life with you. You are God’s gift to us and what a gift you have been!

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