Eliot loves to laugh, his little brother makes him laugh a lot. At the same time, he is very responsible, cautious, smart, funny, and has a gear sense of humor. He loves art, we used to spend hours doing arts and crafts in the hospital. He also loves Lego (because of the time spent in the hospital building them).
Eliot was diagnosed while we were spending a weekend in NYC and he started complaining about abdominal pain. After a night of no sleep, we took him to the ER and they found a mass during an ultrasound.
His cancer diagnosis and treatment have gone parallel with the pandemic. I (the mother of Eliot) had to stop working the moment they diagnosed him (as of now I haven’t been back to work yet). My husband is working remotely to protect our immunocompromised child. My younger son Samuel who is now 2.5 had to stop attending daycare (for economic and health risk reasons). We moved to a different place (from a more urban area to a more rural town), Eliot has missed a lot of school and he still does anytime we go out for treatment. Financially it’s been a struggle and emotionally we are constantly trying to learn how to deal with it.
Eliot has been so brave and resilient. He has undergone the harshest of treatments and still laughed. He is asking more and more about his disease and why all the painful immunotherapy he has been getting and why he continues to go to the hospital. We have always explained everything to him in an easy-to-understand language. He is bilingual (English and Spanish) and very bright.
Hope session by Christina Houser Photography | Facebook | Instagram