
Cancer in Your Corner
Jul 13, 2022
Clayton Hess MD MPH
John had watched The LEGO Movie so much, he could act out any scene — and did.
“Good morning, apartment.”
“Good morning, doorway.”
“Good morning, wall.”
“Good morning, ceiling.”
“Good morning, floor.”
“Ready to start the day.”
He pretended to search through books on a shelf.
“Ah, here it is. Instructions to fit in, have everybody like you, and always be happy.”
“Step 1: breathe.”
John was a bald little boy. Reenacting the film’s opening scene, John took in a deep breath and slowly leaned backwards, far backwards, nearly tipping himself over. He held us in suspense. After what seemed like too long a time to be leaning so far, he finally popped back up to an upright position, exhaled, and finished the quotation with a huge smile: “See, got that one down.”
He re-created the movie scene perfectly and had the entire oncology staff in stitches. To better appreciate John’s LEGO obsession, many of us had re-watched the movie when he had arrived the our cancer center a few weeks prior.
John loved LEGOs, carried them everywhere, built elaborate complexities, and did impressions of movie characters – especially Batman. “Everything is awesome!” he would announce with clenched neck and fists, in as guttural a voice as any 5-year-old Batman wanna-be. He’d then skip down the hall to be put to sleep. John said that donning his immobilization mask, which had been decorated so he looked like Batman, was also “awesome.” Except it wasn’t — John was up against a real supervillain — he was undergoing radiation treatments for childhood brain cancer
LEGOs are how he coped, or better, how he lived. They seemed conveniently — but not intentionally — to also help the adults around him cope with a tragedy only he had to live. I was among these adults — one of his radiation doctors at Boston’s Massachusetts General Hospital, treating childhood brain tumors with a special form of radiation called proton therapy. John was one of the very unlucky few whose DNA — or deoxyribose nucleic acid — had mutated as a child. This caused one of his brain cells to turn rouge, clone itself, grow rapidly, and threaten his life.
Like John’s multi-colored LEGOs, we are made of small building blocks. DNA is a microscopic sugar that comes in four variants — adenine, guanine, thymine, and cytosine — that are pieced together to make instructions for how our bodies work. This complex code can be thought of like chapters in a book with marching orders specific to each body part: how to be a baby or how to be a brain, for example. Each time our body grows, our cells make a photocopy of that entire code. Cancer happens when the pages get out of order during the copy process and change the original instructions. Mistakes in just the wrong place can give the wrong instructions. This is how cancers form.
John had learned this. When he woke from anesthesia after his radiation treatment, he would sometimes call for his LEGOs, conclude that someone had snuck in while he slept, changed a certain toy the wrong way, and announced that he alone could fix it. He would re-shuffle the colored pieces, improve something about it, and announce the toy “cured.”
For Nevada County readers seeking their own cancer cures, John’s memory reminds us not only that cancer forms from mis-shuffling DNA like colored LEGO pieces, but also that even amid a cancer journey, joy for today can outshine worry for tomorrow — step one is to breathe.
Dr. Clayton Hess is the Medical Director of Radiation Oncology at Sierra Nevada Memorial Hospital. Dr. Hess’ views are his own and do not reflect official positions of CommonSpirit Health, Dignity Health, or Sierra Nevada Memorial Hospital. Some aspects of this article are fictionalized history but based on a true story. All names are fictitious to protect patient confidentiality.