I look at your images, the artifacts created as electrons or magentic fields passed by you, the colors of pink and blue that my tools can create when applied to your flesh, and also to your bone. Although the story now is black and white, its clarity assured, I do not know you. Your face, your laugh, I've never seen, never heard. Your childhood triumphs I never cheered, your adolescent trials never moaned. But this one is unlike any other, a pain you felt deep in your bone.
I can see now how that pain began as the periosteum stretched taut, resisted, and aroused your brain to complain that something was not right! You voiced your concern, but a first attempt to treat a bruise to which all boys who are boys, rough or tumble, might be subject, did not surmount the pressure from within. As cells and swelling increased the mass kept pushing outward without respect.
I do not know the agony that your parents felt, when with you in tow they again sought medical advice, and first saw the beast revealed. Called by name by a brave radiologist who sent you to the best that he knew, to confirm and then to treat. The anxious hours of your next journey I did not endure, nor the pain of having the needle bore through skin and bone to sample inside. And yet twas not enough! The answer did but skim the scales of the beast who'd wrapped himself in guise, trying to hide until he'd be too large to slay, until he'd taken form to reproduce himself and set his daughters sailing off to homes in far flung lungs or other bones.
Another sample you endured, but still no firm conclusion, Ugh, the frustration now was lingering on the lip of anger or rebellion, intensifying pain you felt, and bringing tears at night to she who'd weaned you not so long ago, and yet would ne'r forget. What mother wouldn't cry to watch a child hamstrung by pain, and yet not find an explanation, nor a path to cure?
And so a third time opened they the leg which hid the beast, reached deeper in to his dark cave and pulled his brittle flesh apart. It was not much, but just enough to convince the doctor then, that this was true osteosarcoma, enmeshed below his covering of rocks, and likely to cost you your life if left alone to grow. "But no!" said some, and willing hope that justice would not let it so be that your life should end, or you so innocent and good be victim of this beast-- a doubt that cut off plans to treat, while search for other answers sought to bring more hope for cure.
I do not know you, yet I know so much I cannot tell. I know why long ago I loved the study of these cells, and know how much I learned from dear old Walter, and from his side-kick Al. A gift from God it was to me, and now my gift to you, with hope that knowing finally, the path to cure may crack it's gate for you. I'm grateful that I was sent to be here at this time for you, with knowledge of my own, an endowment from above, and too, support from others wise and true, in their compassion felt for you. I do not know you, but I feel His love, and love you too.
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