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Ty Cambra comes home
by John Tawa
Ten-year-old Ty Cambra answered the door at his home Tuesday, one week after returning to Manhattan Beach. It's been four months since Ty traveled to Minnesota with his parents to receive a potentially life-saving bone marrow transplant, and nine months since doctors discovered that Ty had the life-threatening ailment adrenoleukodystrophy ("ALD"), better known as "Lorenzo's Oil Disease."
After some scary moments in Minnesota, Ty has regained a lot of his strength and stamina. He no longer needs a wheelchair. Peach fuzz sprouts from the top of his head. He may have even grown a little. His old spunk is slowly coming back, even as his appetite remains absent.
"The physical part I'm glad to see coming back," said Ty's father Rick Cambra. "He has made a 1,000 percent increase in the past four weeks. As little as three or four weeks ago, he was throwing up. He couldn't do much. He was in bed a lot. The month before that, he was being nose fed."
There are still many things Ty cannot do. Because his new immune system is that of an infant, he can't go outside without wearing a mask. Being around too many potentially infectious people is dangerous, as is breathing Los Angeles' smog-filled air. All that has made the transition from Minnesota to Manhattan Beach a challenging one for Ty and parents Rick and Lynette.
"Now that we're here, he wants to go in the spa, he wants to go to the beach, he wants his brother Lucas (in college at UCI) home to play with him," Rick explained. "Some things he can do, some things he can't. In Minnesota, none of that was a consideration."
But the fears for Ty that accompanied the Cambra family to Minnesota still remain and will for at least the next eight months. There is no assurance that the transplant will take, nor that it will stifle the disease's progression.
"I have fears now and in a way they're worse fears," said Ty's father Rick. "The expectation I had when I left was that, when I came back in four months, we would be moving Ty on a course of getting better with surety. It's four months later and I have no guarantees."
"The bottom line is we may do everything that we can and still end up going through a horrible thing that was going to happen without all this. That is a possibility. I dearly don't want to think about that happening."
For the next two months, Ty will convalesce at home. Rick has returned to his job at the Federal Aviation Administration. Lynette has returned to caring for all of the Cambras' four sons. It's a strange feeling to be home, Rick said.
"We were concentrating on just one thing in Minnesota: taking care of Ty," he explained. "We come home, there are breakfasts and lunches to be prepared, washing to do, cars that need to be lubed, the spa needs fixing, there's shopping to do. It occurred to me that there are a lot of things we do that take up a lot of our time."
"It's back to the rat race, but I can tell you that some things I'm not going to worry about anymore. The first thing we have to do is take care of Ty. Everything else will come after that."
Despite how hectic it's been in the Cambra household during the past week, the Cambras were quick to recognize the community, which poured its heart out to them during this difficult time in their lives.
"I can't say enough about how grateful Lynette and I are for the support we have received from everybody," Rick said. "I had no idea that people cared as much. People went above and beyond any expectation we had. The hardest thing to think about is how could we possibly thank people enough, to let them know how grateful we are for everything."
On April 15, Rick, Lynette and Ty will return to Minnesota for a six-month check-up. ("Ugh!" Ty exclaimed upon hearing this.) Doctors will check the status of the bone marrow transplant and do an MRI scan to compare the disease's status with where it was when Ty first arrived in Minnesota. The hope is that the transplant will still be working and that the ALD, which attacks the brain, will not have progressed.
"There's nothing I can do but wait," Rick said with resignation. "This is out of anybody's control that I know of in the world. I can't make the disease go away or take it on myself. It's in God's hands."
For Ty, two months is a long way away. He's focused on the here and now. Baby steps.
"Today, I'm going in the spa," he said. ER