“The night the MIP phrase was born.
“On February 22, 2014, we were instructed to take our son, Colin, to the Emergency Department at Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia, CHOP. We were told they were expecting us and true to the statement, upon arrival we were immediately whisked back to a room. Being told our son has cancer, everything was a blur. Not much was making sense to us. What I recall the most from that first night, was the doctor saying to Colin, “you are a most important person to us and we will do everything we can to get you better. It was that night, that we started calling Colin a MIP. ” ”
After that first night in CHOP, Colin went on to fight for four years, spending over 350 nights inpatient at Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia. His treatment included well over 350 doctor appointments, countless procedures and instead of being in school, untold hours in waiting rooms.
Colin’s four-year journey took him through two cancers (Burkitt’s Leukemia and Acute Myeloid Leukemia) and a stem cell transplant. Unfortunately, the intensity of all the treatments destroyed a portion of Colin’s immune system. Late treatment effects and infections caused his lungs to fail and on April 19, 2018, Colin asked to be removed from the ventilator. He passed away a few hours later. Throughout his treatment and subsequent fight to recover, Colin truly remained the most important person in his treatment plan.
To our family, being The MIP meant looking at Colin as a whole person, not just a diagnosis of cancer. We wanted to continue his daily routine and normalize his life as much as possible. More importantly, we wanted to equip him with skills to be able to understand that while cancer hugely impacted his life he could still maintain his dignity and control over his situation. This took us on many quests to find quality mental health care and support. For our MIP, skills such as Bio-Feedback, Therapy with a chronic illness specialist, Psychiatric support for anti-depressants, Cognitive Restructuring (positive thinking), Music Therapy, and Art Therapy were powerful tools that helped him cope with what was happening to him. However, these services were often a struggle to find and could be quite costly.
We always said to Colin, “you can’t control that you got cancer, but you can certainly control how you handle it.” We worked hard to give him “days off from cancer” where he could just be a teen, to remember what he was fighting so hard for. After all, a teen with cancer is still just a teen.
Colin is so very missed. His strength and determination, kindness and sense of humor, his crazy good magic card skills, and supernatural ability to quote Family Guy episodes never wavered despite the never ending obstacles he faced. Colin was and still is, without a doubt, truly a most important person.
