Family races for cancer research
Survivors spur dad, daughters on
Mark Sampson walked out of the doctor’s office at Massachusetts General Hospital, collapsed in the stairwell, and cried.
Doctors said his happy, active 22-month-old son, Michael, had a tennis ball-sized brain tumor that would likely take him within six months.
“It was a nightmare. Devastating,” said Mark of Middleton. “You can’t even picture your child dying before you.”
But the months turned to years, and the years turned to decades. That same little boy, now a 21-year-old man, will be at the finish line while his dad runs the Boston Marathon to benefit the MassGeneral Hospital for Children — 20 years later, almost to the day.
“It’s a miracle, a blessing,” Mark said. “You go through that process and you start seeing them getting better and making that progress. Faith is something you cling to.”
Mark and his daughters, Jordan and Kaitlin, will be running the Boston Marathon on April 16. It won’t be Mark’s first time — he ran in 2000 and 2001. But this is the first time he’ll be joined by his two daughters.
Jordan, 27, said she and her sister were standing at the finish line by the Lenox Hotel last year when they decided they would run in honor of their little brother.
Jordan and Kaitlin turned to each other at the same time, both arriving at the same conclusion.
“Why don’t we do this?” Jordan said to Kaitlin, 25. “What’s stopping us?”
“That sort of sparked the conversation,” Jordan remembers. “We all started training right before Christmas.”
Jordan said although they will be running for pediatric oncology research, they’ll also be crossing the finish line with their mother in mind — Jodi Sampson fought her own battle with breast cancer starting in 2006.
In 2011, during the doctor’s visit she hoped would have declared her officially cancer-free, she was told the cancer had come back.
“I was terrified when she was diagnosed. Terrified,” Jordan said. “And the scariness of her being sick brought up what my brother had been through.”
Jodi finally beat the disease after years of radiation treatments. Michael has undergone chemotherapy, radiation, a stem cell transplant and more than 30 surgeries in his life. The treatments caused seizures that left him with some learning difficulties, which is common for children who have had aggressive cancer treatments at a young age.
When Mark, Jordan and Kaitlin make it to the end of the marathon, Jodi will be overcome with gratitude, she said.
“The experiences have given me a whole new perspective on life and how fragile it is,” Jodi said. “It’ll be a really beautiful thing. It’s a sacrifice of love.”