An incredibly shrinking world

“Every­one just needs to stop and appre­ci­ate every­thing they have because you never know when your life will be turned upside down.”

— Andrea Mitcheltree

Sen. John McCain kisses 15-month-old Dun­can Mitchel­tree dur­ing a cam­paign visit in Octo­ber 2008 at LeHigh Uni­ver­sity in Beth­le­hem, Pa. (Asso­ci­ated Press file)

Who doesn’t love kiss­ing a baby? They’re cute, they’re cud­dly, they make fun noises and, as long as they’re not spit­ting up on you, they remind you of the amaz­ing won­der of life.

It’s a pres­i­den­tial elec­tion year in the U.S. and so it’s hard to turn on the tele­vi­sion or look on the Inter­net with­out see­ing images of pres­i­den­tial can­di­dates on the cam­paign trail, shak­ing hands and mak­ing speeches. So it was, a few weeks ago, that I went to the Inter­net quiz site Sporcle.com (where users are per­mit­ted to make and con­tribute quizzes) and put together a quiz made up of images of pres­i­den­tial can­di­dates kiss­ing babies.

Search­ing the Inter­net for images pro­duced the expected results — lots of shots of can­di­dates laugh­ing, smil­ing and mak­ing funny faces and lots of images of some­times smil­ing, some­times cry­ing, some­times con­fused babies and tod­dlers. Sporcle pub­lished the quiz to their web­site on Feb. 3 and I was delighted when another user of the site made the fol­low­ing com­ment on the quiz, “That is my lit­tle boy with John McCain!”

Indeed, the photo of McCain showed him at a 2008 rally at Lehigh Uni­ver­sity in Penn­syl­va­nia. In the photo, the Ari­zona Sen­a­tor is smooching an absolutely adorable lit­tle boy in a red shirt. Sporcle’s vice-president of prod­ucts, Derek Pharr, con­tacted the user who left the com­ment. What fol­lows is a story that will make you mar­vel at the con­nec­tiv­ity of the mod­ern world, but more impor­tantly, a story that will touch your heart.

The user turned out to be Andrea Mitchel­tree of Beth­le­hem, Pa., and the mother of three chil­dren, includ­ing lit­tle Dun­can Mitchel­tree, who was 15 months old when the photo was taken at Lehigh in 2008. The story of how the pic­ture came to be is some­what pedes­trian, but the story of what hap­pened after it is remarkable.

Dun­can and his folks went to the McCain/Palin rally with lit­tle Dun­can dressed in an ele­phant cos­tume (a ‘wee-publican’, as his mother says). The rally was crowded and hot and Dun­can over­heated, so he was de-pachydermed prior to meet­ing the Sen­a­tor and hav­ing his pic­ture taken. The photo appeared in some local news­pa­pers and some other media out­lets and then sat dor­mant for four years.

The quiz was played by a col­lege friend of Mitchel­tree. That friend rec­og­nized the boy as Dun­can and emailed a link to the quiz to Mitchel­tree who cre­ated a Sporcle account and left the com­ment. She also was kind enough to respond to Derek when he emailed her, and that takes us to Duncan’s mag­nif­i­cent story.

You see, not long after Dun­can Mitchel­tree met Sen­a­tor John McCain, Dun­can faced a bat­tle much greater than McCain had faced against Barack Obama. Too young to vote, too young to read, too young to know what the men and women in the white lab coats were say­ing or why his par­ents, Andrea and Eric, were so upset, Dun­can Mitchel­tree — that adorable, cheru­bic, blond boy in the Sporcle quiz — faced a fight for his life.

Shortly before Christ­mas in 2009, he just couldn’t shake a fever and sore throat. His mom took him to the doc­tor hop­ing that he wouldn’t be sick over Christ­mas. She later told a local news­pa­per reporter, “I thought we’d go to the pedi­a­tri­cian and worst case sce­nario he’d diag­nose him with strep throat and start an antibi­otic.” Instead, the doc­tor sent them for an ultra­sound and the ultra­sound found a mass in Duncan’s abdomen. Two year-old Dun­can Mitchel­tree had can­cer. “They told us to pack a bag and go directly to the hos­pi­tal,” his mother said. “What do you pack when you think your child is going to die?”

The tumor was the size of a sports bot­tle and resulted from a form of kid­ney can­cer that fre­quently strikes chil­dren. Surgery suc­cess­fully removed the tumor and one of Duncan’s kid­neys, but his bat­tle wasn’t over yet. Fol­low­ing the surgery, Dun­can faced months of radi­a­tion and chemother­apy. Even then, though, Dun­can was on the mend. “Every day after that has been a pos­i­tive step for­ward,” his father said.

Since his diag­no­sis, Dun­can has had many heroes in his life, includ­ing his par­ents and his big sis­ter. Indeed, they have worked tire­lessly to raise pedi­atric can­cer aware­ness and to help raise money for other fam­i­lies that find them­selves fac­ing an unex­pected bat­tle. In par­tic­u­lar, the Mitchel­trees cite The Pedi­atric Can­cer Foun­da­tion of the Lehigh Val­ley and its ‘Chemo Cir­cus.’ Twice a month the Foun­da­tion gath­ers clowns, artists, mas­sage ther­a­pists and other vol­un­teers who go into the chemother­apy clin­ics to make the expe­ri­ence more liv­able for pedi­atric can­cer patients and their fam­i­lies. The cir­cus is just one of the ways that the Foun­da­tion pro­vides support.

Dun­can is now four and a half years old. He is fin­ished with radi­a­tion and chemother­apy and the great news is that his form of can­cer has a 90 per­cent cure rate if it is caught early, removed and appro­pri­ately treated. He has a new baby sis­ter and, when he hits five years with­out any recur­rence of his can­cer (a date that will come in 2015), his doc­tors will offi­cially declare him can­cer free. You can sup­port the work of the foun­da­tion at pcflv.org by donat­ing to them using Paypal.

The Repub­li­can pri­mary in Penn­syl­va­nia isn’t until April 24. Per­haps this year we’ll get a new pic­ture of Duncan’s baby sis­ter get­ting a smooch from a can­di­date, a healthy, happy Dun­can at her side.

David Hej­manowski is a mag­is­trate and court admin­is­tra­tor of the Delaware County Juve­nile Court and for­mer assis­tant pros­e­cut­ing attorney.

Posted by Dave Hejmanowski on Mar 9 2012. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS Feed. Comments can be made below.