STRONG

T he Stark family is in almost every way the quintes-sential American family. Craig and Julie Stark live in a well-kept suburban home in an idyllic area of Hampden, Massachusetts. When I stop by to visit

them late one afternoon, children’s toys dot the landscape of their spacious yard. A pair of scooters lean against the garage. Soccer balls and hula hoops adorn the floor of the porch, along with a tee ball stand, a well-loved red wagon, a telescope, and a slew of other playthings. Julie Stark greets me at the door. So too does Otto, the family’s springer spaniel, though with a bit more trepida-tion. Julie, an English teacher at East Longmeadow High School, introduces me to her husband, Craig, and three young children. Charlotte is the oldest, Emily is the middle child, and then there’s Andrew-- he’s the reason I’m here today.Andrew, a fair skinned eight-year-old with a full head of bushy

brown hair hides shyly behind his video game on the couch when Julie introduces me to him. He is, by appearance, a typically

healthy kid. He doesn’t really remember much about what he and his family have been through over the past two years, or perhaps he just doesn’t know how to talk about it. He’s full of energy and is charmingly mischievous, vying for his parents’ attention as I talk with them about the ordeal. In September of 2013, Julie and Craig tell me, they began no-

ticing strange bruises on Andrew that neither he nor they could explain. This might not necessarily be unusual for a five-year-old, but the family really began to worry when a large bruise appeared on Andrew’s forehead and he couldn’t recall how he got it. A short time later, Julie noticed red spots appearing on his skin. Andrew complained of feeling tired and nauseous. Fearing the worst, Ju-lie arranged an appointment with Andrew’s pediatrician, who ad-vised the family to take Andrew to the emergency room immedi-ately for blood tests. That same day the Starks received the news that no family is ever prepared to hear: Andrew was diagnosed with leukemia.

How one family is beating cancer together

JACQUELINE M. SIDOR JMS ART & PHOTO ! PETER VANCINI

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“You can’t really mentally prepare,” says Julie. “You just go. You’re fighting so hard that you don’t really know how to stop. You don’t really think about it because it’s your kid.”Andrew’s cancer is known as Acute Lymphoblastic Leukemia, or

ALL. It’s characterized by the overproduction of immature white blood cells in the bone marrow, which can lead quickly to a deteriora-tion in the immune system. Indeed, this was the case with Andrew. The cancer was alarmingly aggressive. From the moment he was di-agnosed, Andrew was on a treatment plan. He was placed under the care of oncologists at Baystate Medical’s D’Amour Center and Dana Farber Cancer Institute. Andrew endured steroid treatments that made him gain weight and feel angry, a type of chemotherapy which required injections directly into his spine, and full-body irradiation treatment. Despite the hardship and pain, Andrew’s family says he never complained.Ultimately, Andrew relapsed and the doctors decided that his best

hope was to receive a bone marrow transplant. The doctors deliv-ered some difficult news to the family.“It was a fifty-fifty chance,” says Julie. Her eyes shimmer with tears

at the recollection. “I remember talking to his doctor and saying, ‘I did not expect those odds,’ and him saying, ‘You need to remember that Andrew is not a statistic.’ That was the best thing that he could have said. That’s what I focused on because it was a really hard num-ber to hear.”

SUPPORT

The Starks began to see that each member of the family had a

unique role to play in helping Andrew fight cancer. Craig was the numbers guy, carefully analyzing test results. Julie, Craig says, had an uncanny maternal instinct in knowing when something just didn’t seem right. She provided the emotional support everyone needed. Charlotte and Emily supported their brother through his most difficult times. When it was clear that Andrew needed a trans-plant, both sisters bravely stepped forward to be tested as potential matches, knowing well that being a match for Andrew would mean undergoing a painful procedure. Last March, Andrew received that transplant from the closest match the doctors could find to his rare AB negative blood type: his sister Emily. She sums up everyone’s feelings perfectly: “I was scared, but happy,” she says.What’s truly remarkable is the way that the friends of the Starks

have come together to support not just Andrew, but the whole fam-ily in their time of need. The number of people involved in the effort is jaw-dropping and prevents me from acknowledging each of them individually here. The idea for the “Stark Strong” campaign, the family says, came from a friend of the family and Craig’s coworkers at ISO New England. Other family friends have organized countless fundraisers. There are several online campaigns, including a You-Caring.com page which raised over $10,000 in its first week and to date has raised $26,725 toward Andrew’s medical expenses. There have been charity hockey games, blood and platelet drives, a pan-cake breakfast hosted by Andrew’s school (Greenwood Elementa-ry), and an Elks Club event, among others. Friends sported “Stark Strong” shirts and bracelets. They cooked meals for the family to make sure that they were fed properly during Andrew’s treatment.

DIAGNOSIS

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They made quilts or donated blankets and stuffed animals. Small gestures began to mean a lot to the family. When Andrew lost his hair from the chemo treatment, many people shaved their heads in solidarity. The outpouring of support has left the Starks feeling humbled and truly grateful.“It brought us closer together with the community,” says Craig. “I

can really say that our faith in humanity was restored.”Andrew returned to school on December 3, his eighth birthday.

After Andrew’s two relapses, the Starks have learned the hard way not to get their hopes up, but it appears that he’s now in remission and his transplant appears to have been successful. He won’t be considered “cancer-free” until five years from the transplant, says Julie, but they have every reason to be optimistic.What I took away from my conversation with the Starks was that

they are in every way a normal family, and that’s a little scary. They were forced to confront every family’s worst nightmare: hav-ing one of their children diagnosed with a life-threatening dis-ease and facing a dire prognosis. One thing the Starks were eager to point out is that, while childhood cancers are relatively rare, they’re not as rare as they should be. According to St. Jude’s Chil-dren’s Research Hospital, a child’s odds of developing ALL are one in 750. Craig makes a point of telling me that childhood cancer research is underfunded and that he hopes that Andrew’s case can help to raise awareness of that fact. The Starks are the first to ac-knowledge that they’ve been among the lucky ones. They’ve seen firsthand that not every case has a positive outcome.“You become friends in a community with a lot of people who are

going through the same thing,” says Craig. “We learned in a lot of ways we’ve been fortunate. Sadly, some of the complications you just can’t reverse… they just don’t make it.”To date, Andrew’s treatment has been effective, though the spec-

ter of another relapse will always hang over them. They’ve count-

ed themselves lucky in another way, too. They’ve enjoyed unprec-edented support from the community. Now, as Andrew sits at the dining room table, closely observing

his beta fish while he crumbles flakes of food into the bowl, it’s hard to imagine that this is the same child who just a few months ago was undergoing aggressive cancer treatment.I ask him if he understands what his sister did for him. He smiles

and mumbles, “Saved my life.” But it wasn’t just Emily that saved his life, though she played an undeniable role. It was his entire family through their actions and with their love and support. But the burden was more than the family could bear, too, and they in turn were seen through the difficult journey by the love and sup-port of their community.For the foreseeable future, Andrew will still be undergoing check-

ups and submitting to tests, but he is in remission and things are looking up. It seems that Andrew Stark is well on his way to be-coming a normal kid again.Those wishing to make a donation to help the Stark family with

medical costs should visit youcaring.com/medical-fundraiser/stark-strong. Visit the Facebook page at www.facebook.com/StarkStrongTeam.

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