Relay for Life hosts survivors banquet
By Phyllis Moore
Published in News on April 22, 2016 1:46 PM
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News-Argus/ALAN CAMPBELL
Chase Hooker, 5, a Youth Honorary Chair for this year's Relay for Life, takes a photo of his parents during the Wayne County Royal Survivors Banquet.
Anytime James McKeel gets an opportunity to talk about his family, especially his children, he is all in.
Even if it means sharing the details about their battle with cancer.
"I'm not a survivor but I have somebody real close to me that is," he told the crowd at the 2016 Royal Survivors Celebration for Relay for Life on Thursday evening at the First Pentecostal Holiness Church.
As a high school graduate "from this century," McKeel admitted that many in his demographic were ill-equipped to hear such a diagnosis. Unfortunately, cancer does not care about age or gender or ethnicity, he said.
At his side was his daughter, Isabella McKeel, her cascading curls bouncing. She's 7 years old now, but she was only 4 when she was diagnosed with leukemia, said the father of three.
"My job is to put food on the table and to make sure we have got everything we need and then on March 20, 2015, my wife took Isabella to the doctor right here in Mount Olive and the doctor said she had leukemia," he said. "I will never be able to repay my wife for having to hear that (news) by herself."
The pace of their life quickly changed, he said, rushing to Duke that night to embark on a whirlwind that included treatments, hair loss for the bubbly brunette and the overwhelming stresses of mounting medical bills.
"I worried about where the money was going to come from but every time I went to swipe the debit card, the money was always there," he said, drawing applause from the audience. "Folks at work told me, you take care of your family, we'll take care of everything else."
He made no apologies for his voice breaking, emotions still raw and often on the surface.
The example of his daughter, always smiling in the midst of the battle, made him even more determined to speak out about the importance of research and organizations like Relay for Life and the American Cancer Society.
"There's nothing that I will ever be able to do to show my appreciation," he said. "If it's letting a few hundred people see my emotions, that's fine.
"The only way we're going to get to where we need to find the cure for this, it's going to take groups like this saying, we're going to win. We are going to win."
Childhood cancers are especially tricky, he said, as the government only designates 4 percent of funding to pediatric cancer.
"If I was to donate $500 tonight to cancer research, $20 is going to childhood cancer research," McKeel said.
Next week marks eight months since treatment wrapped up for his daughter. He said while the future may be unknown and Isabella too young to understand what she is fighting for, he will be her advocate.
"But I do know if I put the trust in the Lord, I'm not going to have anything at all to worry about," he said. "The cure is out there. We just have to find it."
Isabella is one of two youth honorary chairs for this year's Relay for Life event, which will be held May 20-21 at the Wayne County Agricultural Fairgrounds. The signature event for the American Cancer Society raises funds for cancer research and patient support.
The father of the other youth honorary chair also took to the stage to share about son Chase Hooker's cancer journey.
Jerimee Hooker praised the survivors and caregivers at the gathering, saying he admired their strength. It was something he didn't realize was within him until his little boy was diagnosed with cancer.
"Two days after Christmas (2014), he'd been sick for two weeks, seems like," Hooker said, recalling visits to the doctor that produced no results.
Then his wife, Amy, a nurse at Wayne Radiation Oncology Center, uttered the prophetic words he wished had remained unsaid.
"'He's got all the symptoms of leukemia,'" he said, his voice breaking. "It made me so mad hearing her say that because I knew she knew what she was talking about.
"I said, 'God, please don't do this to us. Please don't do this.'"
The "devastating" diagnosis for Chase, then 4, came soon after, followed by hospitalization in Greenville.
"We lived in the hospital room for two months," Hooker said. "We also have a 2-year-old little boy. For two months we didn't see him because we never left Greenville."
But there were lessons in the midst of the struggle, he said.
"We learned something real valuable in that two months -- that God had a plan for our lives and that he was preparing us for something much bigger than ourselves and He had done that long before Chase was diagnosed with cancer," he said. "You know, sometimes we take for granted our health.
"And sometimes we can be selfish and it takes something like this to happen to us or to our family to be able to see what it's like to be so selfish."
Chase has now been in treatment for a year. At the end of January 2015, their doctor told the family the youth was in remission.
"He's got two more years to go of treatments and we pray to God we're going to be through, but we're not going to be through serving," Jerimee said. "We're still going to be out there, still going to be at Relay, still going to be raising money for research."