AURORA (AP) – The walls of the Center for Cancer and Blood Disorders at Children’s Hospital Colorado in Aurora are bright and welcoming – some are covered with pictures of wildflowers, others hold distractions such as a video game console for anxious parents who wait with their children in the lobby.
But Paul Lemieux, a 25-year-old cancer survivor, was only interested in one thing on a recent Thursday in July: whether this visit to Children’s would be his last as a patient.
“I grew up a very healthy kid,” said Lemieux, who was diagnosed at age 11 with primary intracranial choriocarcinoma, an aggressive cancerous tumor in his brain. “To be diagnosed with cancer wasn’t anything I was expecting, it wasn’t anything my parents were expecting. It just hits you blindly.”
Lemieux said the hardest part of the diagnosis was the beginning, where his only symptoms were throwing up and having a terrible headache. It was a CAT scan at a Boulder clinic that revealed a mass in his brain, reported the Aurora Sentinel.
By the time he arrived at the emergency department at Children’s Colorado, doctors performed surgery on him that evening to relieve the pressure on his brain and conducted a biopsy, which revealed that the growth was malignant. That followed with a hospital stay where he underwent six rounds of chemotherapy and five weeks of radiation.
“I missed most of my sixth-grade year,” Lemieux said. A year later, Lemieux was given news that he was in remission, but for nearly 15 years has returned to Children’s for treatments and checkups with pediatric oncologist Dr. Nick Foreman.
Foreman, who has served as Lemieux’s physician for over a decade at Children’s, brought two brain scans to what both hoped would be Lemieux’s last appointment. The first showed Lemieux’s tumor from the time he was diagnosed in 2002, the second was the newest scan.
Lemieux’s scan was all clear, Foreman said, and the mood was light the rest of the visit.
Foreman told Lemieux it would still be necessary to have a brain scan every few years because of the exposure to radiation during chemotherapy. He also said Lemieux would be at risk for meningioma for the rest of his life, a tumor that can grow on the surface of the brain.
Foreman, who has worked with Lemieux since the diagnosis, said it meant the world to him to see his patient in complete remission.
“I’ve done this 30 years now, and the reward is actually seeing the people who are cured. And also seeing so many of them in good shape,” Foreman said. “Not only is the fraction of people who are cured much higher than it was when I was first doing this in the 80s, but actually those people are in much better shape than they were. We have people who are working, who have children, have families.”
Lemieux is no exception. Despite missing most of his sixth-grade year, he went on to graduate from high school and also receive a bachelor’s degree from Whitman College in Washington. Today, he is working for the medical staff at Children’s in the emergency department as a certified medical technician.
He is also in the process of applying to medical school to become a pediatrician. He said Dr. Foreman has been a significant role model in his life.
“Before I was diagnosed, I had no intention of going to medical school,” Lemieux said.
“I wasn’t one of those kids who dreamed of being a doctor, even after treatment. For a few years, I didn’t really ever want to step foot in a hospital again. I think with time and distance I’ve come back. It seems like the natural progression of things to hopefully take up the reigns as a provider.”
This year, Lemieux also rode in Children’s 10th Courage Classic bike ride with the Wheels of Justice team, which raises money for the Center for Cancer and Blood Disorders.
“I’m very grateful to be here,” Lemieux said of the years he spent receiving treatment from Children’s. “There’s not much I did to be a survivor. It’s thanks to Nick Foreman and to the brilliance of everyone treating me.”
