GRESHAM, Ore. — Pamela Fryberger dabbed at her brimming eyes Monday as she and husband Dennis accepted the gift of a sleek black 2005 Volkswagen Jetta station wagon at an auto body shop here.
The new wheels, courtesy of a national charitable program called Recycled Rides, will let the Frybergers make more frequent trips from their Orchards home to Doernbecher Children’s Hospital in Portland, where their 12-year-old son, Steven, is being treated for an acute form of leukemia.
The mother’s tears of joy were mixed with tears of anguish over the latest setback in the family’s 10-month journey through the harsh world of childhood leukemia. On Thursday, the Frybergers learned that Steven’s planned December trip to Disney World, courtesy of the Make-A-Wish Foundation, is on indefinite hold while the boy endures six weeks of intravenous feeding to give his stomach a rest.
A war is raging inside Steven’s body between his natural immune system and the bone marrow transplant he received in June. In a condition called “graft-versus-host disease,” his newly transplanted bone marrow is attacking his body, which is programmed to reject it.
“It’s important that his graft win this battle,” Pamela Fryberger said. “We don’t want his body winning.”
The condition has severely restricted the kinds of foods Steven can digest — no Pizza Pockets or mac and cheese, lots of cranberry juice. Now, his food will come through an IV tube.
“The doctors gave him two options: complete stomach rest for a month and half, or eat what he wants and he dies,” his mother said. “He made the choice to live.”
Life struggles
Like so many working-class families, the Frybergers were struggling to get by even before the strength and color drained from Steven’s body over a few days in early February, just after Super Bowl Sunday.
Dennis Fryberger delivers The Columbian and The Oregonian in Clark County, putting 50 miles a night on his 1986 four-cylinder van. When he gets home in the morning, Pamela drives the van to her job at a Fred Meyer store, which provides health coverage for the family.
The van, which has no back seat, has broken down a half-dozen times and is on its third transmission. Several times the Frybergers have had to rent a car to get to work, an unexpected expense that caused them to fall behind in their mortgage payments.
When Steven was stricken with acute myelogenous leukemia, a cancer that attacks the blood cells of the bone marrow, the family was in desperate need of a reliable vehicle so that at least one parent could be there to see him through the five rounds of chemotherapy that followed. Often, his parents made it to the hospital only once or twice a week.
“He was in such a depressed state, he was curled up in a ball on the bed with the lights off,” Dennis Fryberger said.
Fortunately, Steven’s aunt, Sally Fryberger, volunteered to stay with Stephen in his hospital room. With her encouragement, he has begun walking the hallways of the ward, using weights, showing an interest in games and TV programs. Steven calls her “the information person” because she is the family’s authority on the details of his illness and his progress.
A social worker at the hospital told the Kiwanis Doernbecher Children’s Cancer Program about the family’s plight. The Kiwanis Club in turn got in touch with the Fix Auto Oregon/SW Washington Network, a group of auto body shops in the Portland-Vancouver metro area.
This year for the first time, the local shops joined the national Recycled Rides program. On Monday, participating auto body shops and insurance companies across the nation put 68 refurbished vehicles into the hands of families in need.
Geico Insurance donated the Frybergers’ car, recovered after an auto theft in the Seattle area. Fix Auto repaired some minor dings and repainted the car. Eleven companies in all contributed engine work, fuel cards and bins of toys and games for Steven, including a PlayStation.
Steven’s 15-year-old sister, Denise, who has helped with her dad’s newspaper route, got gift cards, too.
Sudden onset
At Monday’s ceremony, the Frybergers stood and thanked everyone. Then Dennis repeated the story that even after nearly 10 months seems unreal to him:
A healthy seventh-grader at Covington Middle School who loved skateboarding, football and basketball, whose favorite movie was “Transformers,” who liked to play Trilogy, who was good at math, suddenly started running down like a battery.
Steven was boisterous and healthy that Super Bowl Sunday. The next day, Dennis got a call from his school, which was just five minutes away: “Dad, come and get me,” Steven said. “I’m so tired.”
For four days the boy grew progressively weaker. He was unable to lift his knapsack, then unable to walk. His parents took him to the doctor. There was a blood test, then an early morning call: “Take him to Doernbecher right now!”
“Doc, you’re scaring me,” Dennis Fryberger said.
“You should be scared,” the doctor responded.
Steven figured out he had cancer even before the doctor told it to him straight.
It was five days after Super Bowl Sunday, and everything had changed.
The intervening months have been a nightmare of chemotherapy treatments followed by severe vomiting and hospital discharges followed by re-admissions. This time, Steven has been hospitalized for two months. He has no discharge date.
“I’ve been in here for pretty much every single holiday,” Steven said last week as he sat in his hospital room, hugging a stuffed bear and ticking off all the foods he can’t eat: no deviled eggs, no chicken strips, no pumpkin pie. His eyes lit up, though, when he described all the rides he wanted to try at Disney World.
As a consolation prize, he and his parents went to a Trail Blazer game Saturday night and sat in a box with other Doernbecher patients and their families.
And now his parents have a nice car to ride in when they visit him. They hope to take him for a spin soon.
“He only asked me one time, ‘Dad, why me?’” Dennis Fryberger told the gathering of generous well-wishers who made it happen. “He has been one strong little boy.”
