The holiday season has not always been a happy time for Peter Thompson and his family.
It was New Year’s Eve in 2018 when Thompson and his wife, Jennifer, learned that their youngest son, Easten, had acute myeloid leukemia. He was 3 months old.
“It’s a nasty one,” Thompson said about the cancer doctors at the Montreal Children’s Hospital detected in Easten. “I was holding him in my arms when they told me and my legs buckled. I was worried I was going to drop him. You feel like your world is coming to an end. It was devastating, scary … so many emotions.”
Easten had been having bladder infections — a sign that his immune system wasn’t working properly — and Thompson and his wife decided to take him to the hospital after discovering a lump just below his ear.
“Right away, I knew something was wrong and I screamed to my wife,” Thompson recalled. “She came over and felt the lump and maybe we tried to talk ourselves out of it that maybe it was just a bad virus and a weird reaction of the lymph node or something.”
It was much worse than that.
Easten went through five rounds of chemotherapy and a stem-cell transplant. His parents and doctors were hoping that would get rid of the cancer.
It did ... but a year later it came back.
“It was always around the same time of year that we had this news,” Thompson said. “Unfortunately, it was always around Christmas-time.”
Easten had to go through more rounds of chemotherapy, another stem-cell transplant and radiation treatment.
“It’s pretty severe because it’s not great for a kid his age to have radiation because it can be quite damaging,” Thompson said. “Easten lost a lot of his vision the second time the cancer came back because it was in the fluid around his brain and it put so much pressure against his skull that it crushed both of his optic nerves. So he lost probably between 60 and 80 per cent of his vision.”
While Easten will likely have struggles with his vision for the rest of his life, he has now been in remission from his cancer for more than three years.
“Everything is clear now cancer-wise,” Thompson said about his son. “The damage to his eyes remains, but he’s a very, very happy boy. He plays hockey … he can’t see very well, but he skates around and has fun. He’s in school now, in his first year of kindergarten. We’re the lucky ones. A lot of people who are going through what we’ve been through don’t always end up as lucky. It’s a very awful experience for any parent to have to through something like that.”
Easten found himself in the spotlight when the Canadiens held their annual Hockey Fights Cancer Night on Nov. 23 at the Bell Centre when they lost 6-2 to the Vegas Golden Knights. Easten was one of 12 children who have been stricken by cancer who joined players from both teams to stand beside them on the blue line during the playing of the national anthems before the game. When Easten started to slip while stepping on the ice, the Canadiens’ Josh Anderson picked him up and carried him to the blue line to stand beside him.
Thompson, his wife and their 7-year-old son, Ellis, were all at the game after being invited by Leucan — an association that has been supporting children with cancer and their families for more than 45 years — and were able to watch from a private loge thanks to the generosity of corporate box holders.
“It’s hard to put into words,” Thompson said when asked what it was like to see Anderson pick up his son. “But for us it was so special because we’re at the end of our journey in our mind. So we’re kind of closing the chapter and for me it was kind of closure in a way to what we’ve gone through. It just kind of felt like closure. A book-end in a way to everything that we’ve gone through. It was like a very special reward. Josh was just unbelievable with Easten. I really have to commend him.”
After everything they have been through with Easten, Thompson is looking forward to having a merry Christmas this year surrounded by family members in Rigaud.
“This Christmas will be more enjoyable than ever,” the father said. “The farther and farther you get away from it — we lived in fear for five years — only now are we starting to feel confident because you don’t know if it’s going to come back. It’s hard to not have it in the back of your mind.
“We’re really looking forward to just staying put and having all the family over to our place,” Thompson added. “Our family is obviously quite close. When something like that happens it really brings everyone together. We’ve had a lot of support from grandparents and stuff like that. So we’ll spend the time at our house and just enjoy every minute together.”
