INCREDIBLE STRENGTH
Kaleb taking on cancer again
Eleven-year-old Kaleb Houle was hauling his family’s garbage cans to the curb last week, when a neighbour remarked to his mom Jennifer: “I can’t believe it, here he is with Stage 4 cancer, doing his chores.”
“That’s Kaleb, his personality, he’s such a good boy,” Jennifer said of her son, who’s been home from school for months, after the nonHodgkins lymphoma he thought he’d beaten in 2014 returned this winter. He’s been receiving chemotherapy in London and is expecting to get a stem cell transplant at Sick Kids Hospital in Toronto in June. But you’d never know he’s sick by looking at him.
“I feel fine, I feel good,” a smiling Kaleb says.
When he learned the cancer had returned, he said he wondered: “Could it really be true? Why?”
But he didn’t stew on the bad hand he’d been dealt. That day, he told his parents he still wanted to go to his regular floor hockey game. He scored six goals.
“Nobody could believe he’d just been diagnosed with a relapse,” his dad Devin said. “He just continued to play.”
According to Jennifer’s good friend Janine Galloway, the entire Houle family is showing incredible strength, supported by friends and neighbours near their Forest Glade home. The family will be spending the next several months going back and forth to London for chemo, and then having an extended stay in Toronto for the transplant.
“It’s really tough, they’ve been through chemotherapy before so having a recurrence, a relapse, is even more challenging because you know what’s coming,” said Galloway. “But they’ve basically pulled up their bootstraps and got down to work.”
An additional setback came out of the blue in December — right around the time doctors started investigating whether Kaleb’s cancer was back — when a vehicle slammed through the glass of a Walker Road medical clinic where Devin was waiting, seriously injuring him. He still is not fit to return to his job as a production supervisor at J.D. Norman Industries. Now he’ll need to take off even more time for Kaleb. The company has been very supportive, Devin said.
He and Jennifer say they’ve been overwhelmed by all the help, which culminates Wednesday at Kaleb’s school, Eastwood elementary, where parents and neighbours are organizing a huge bake sale (9 a.m. to 1 p.m. for students, 1 p.m. to 6 p.m. for the public.) People have donated more than 40 gift baskets that will be raffled off, said organizer Janet Williams, whose daughter Evalyn is friends with Kaleb’s sister Olivia, 8. Williams said when you have a seriously ill child, “the last thing on your mind should be finances.”
Eastwood vice-principal Meredith McGrory said the news of Kaleb’s relapse hit students pretty hard “and everyone wanted to to something.”
She said the outpouring of support has been phenomenal. “This really is a community-based school. Families have lived here a long time and everyone knows everyone.”
Friends have also set up a gofundme account and are organizing a Walk for Kaleb on May 27 to help offset the Houles’ costs.
Kaleb was originally diagnosed with diffuse large B-cell lymphoma — a blood cancer very rare in kids, but common in elderly adults — in February 2014, after the school reported he’d fallen asleep in class and Kaleb told his parents he wasn’t feeling well. The doctor at the walk-in clinic said Kaleb’s pale skin was concerning and told them to take him immediately to the emergency. When they arrived with Kaleb, two nurses walking by stopped in their tracks, scooped him up and took him in.
He went to London and spent three months there receiving chemotherapy. By July 5, Kaleb was in remission.
But last December, during one of his regular checkups in London, his oncologist became concerned with one of his tests for blood hemoglobin. A few weeks later, another test for his platelets showed a concerning drop. The oncologist knew something was up, said Jennifer, and on Feb. 15 a bone marrow biopsy confirmed that his cancer was back.
Doctors at Sick Kids told the family they hope to do an autologous stem cell transplant, which involves using the patient’s own stem cells. They’ll collect his stem cells and store them while they treat him with high doses of chemotherapy so powerful it wipes out his existing stem cells. Then the stored stem cells will be readmitted to his body.
Using his own stem cells will shorten the process, reduce the risk of rejection and eliminate the need for anti-rejection drugs. If it doesn’t work and Kaleb needs stem cells from a donor, it turns out Olivia is a perfect match.
“We’re pretty blessed, if need be,” Jennifer said.
Devin said when Kaleb went through the original chemo rounds back in 2014 he still had appetite, he never vomited and had no fever. Even the current chemo doesn’t seem to take much out of him.
“Somebody who’s been hit so hard with cancer, you’d never guess,” his father said.
“It just goes to show you how strong he is.”