Invitation to Name a Boat Helps Honor a Lost Brother

Source: Peter Wendel

What’s in a name? Perhaps more than one realizes when it’s a homage to the past as well as an acknowledgment of a leap forward in medical history.

Dr. John Fitzpatrick recently got in touch with me. John was part of an elite group of doctors at the Roswell Park Cancer Center a half-century ago. This cadre of doctors and nurses refused to accept the prevailing opinion of the times: that childhood leukemia was too difficult to take on.

Regrettably, many of their peers had taken such a defeatist position. In fact, if you looked at the Handbook of Pediatrics in the early 1960s, there were only a few pages under the header ‘leukemia,” detailing how to make the patient as comfortable as possible. They weren’t expected to live long.

Yet the doctors at Roswell Park refused to accept this do-nothing approach. Instead, they took on cancer, specifically leukemia, which was a leading killer of children at the time.

For their trouble, they were criticized and even ostracized by their peers—labeled “Poison Pushers,” “Renegades,” “Medical Misfits,” and one label they somewhat accepted, the “Cancer Cowboys.”

Despite such opposition, the doctors stuck together and eventually shifted acute lymphoblastic leukemia from a 10 percent survival rate to the 90 percent survival rate it has today.

My brother Eric was a patient of theirs, from 1966 to 1973 at Roswell Park. When he was diagnosed, he was expected to live only a year. Instead, the doctors there kept him alive for nearly eight years, during which he participated in several landmark clinical trials.

I first spoke with John when I was writing Cancer Crossings, which is about those times from my family’s viewpoint and what the doctors were struggling to accomplish.

The book helped “me recall the wonder of my experience at the Roswell Park of the late ’60s and early ’70s,” John told me. “The courage of the parents enduring a truly catastrophic reality. The smiles and ‘ouches’ from the kids. They lived from day to day, never displayed worry about a future, and never stopped living a full daily life. The belief that one could make a difference, no matter how small, has made my time so worthwhile.”

Recently, John and his family donated a sailing dinghy to the Olcott Yacht Club, which is located on the south shore Lake Ontario and in the small harbor my family sailed from. John said he was donating the boat and wanted my family to name it in honor of our brother.

The gesture was generous and apt. In sailing from Olcott, our family made numerous trips across that inland sea to the Canadian side. All of us were taught to steer and set the sails by our father. Together, we learned how to navigate the deeper waters and shifting winds.

Out on Lake Ontario, far from shore, we became as excited as Dad did when the wind gusted, roughing the water’s surface. For the new scallops and divots, appearing as a darker hue, sometimes called cat’s paws, were sure signs that more wind was coming our way. And Eric was better than any of us at noticing such shifts in our immediate surroundings.

So, what to call this craft? This gift from one of the famed Cancer Cowboys? As a family, we threw around plenty of names, including Fearless, Resilience, and Rico, which was my dad’s pet name for my brother.

In the end, though, we settled on Eric. We did so with the hope that whoever skippers that dinghy next, steering it out between the twin piers that mark the entrance to Olcott harbor, heading for lake’s wide expanse, will hear the story of the kid who once sailed those waters, too. A boy with leukemia who exhibited courage and determination far beyond his years.