Struggling with cancer, family seeks local help

When Robyn Coles greets University volunteers at a bone marrow drive for her son Andrew tomorrow, she will be armed with a collage of 40 or so color photos that map out his life so far. Mixed in with the requisite baby pictures and the shots with his two younger brothers in Batman-print pajamas, are the photos of Andrew triumphant — despite the IV in his arm and the hospital room background — taken last December when his cancer went into remission.

These photos are a bittersweet reminder for Robyn of her son's struggle with lymphoma, a form of abnormal cell growth, that has culminated in two blood-testing drives in Princeton to find a potential bone marrow donor for Andrew, who attends the Princeton Day School.

During Communiversity, Princeton's town-gown celebration, the Coles family will be stationed at the Community Park School on Witherspoon Street to put a personal face on the collection drive.

"Not a day goes by when I go to the mailbox and I don't receive letters and cards of support from friends and strangers," she noted, looking over the various photos assembled on the kitchen table at their house on Highland Terrace. "It was devastating when the cancer returned, it's not like we let this dominate our lives, we stayed positive."

In August when doctors diagnosed the then-13 year old with lymphoma, they found a tumor growing in his chest, pushing into his heart. He was given a 90 percent probability of eradicating the cancer.

After four months of chemotherapy at Sloan Kettering in New York, Coles thought he had beaten the cancer. But the remission lasted only six weeks before the tumor came back.

Every three weeks since then he has been back in the hospital for four-day intensive chemo sessions while his doctors wait for a suitable donor to carry out a necessary bone marrow transplant.

"The doctors really don't know what to do with Andrew — it's so rare that the cancer is still there and no donor has been found, that it's pretty much unchartered territory," Coles' mother said Tuesday. While doctors had hoped to find a donor last month, the family waits anxiously in limbo.

"Week to week, the doctors are just buying time. There is no plan of action," she added. "They just don't know."

Talking to Coles, though, it's easy to forget that the articulate man in front of you is a high school freshman battling cancer. Despite his low-key style — wearing a grey v-neck sweater, Polo Sport jeans and a pair of Adidas this Tuesday — Coles' calm, reflective demeanor evokes the self-assurance and determination of someone twice his age. At 14, he has already traveled to Europe and Russia on a Model U.N. trip.

A 5'10" lawyer in-training, Coles seems made more for discussing politics than explaining how chemotherapy has disrupted the rituals of teenagerdom. But in talking about the personal — how his brothers are reacting to his cancer, how he feels about the treatments — the 9th-grader comes out.

"My mom calls me 'Crystal-ball-head' and 'Kojak,' " he said about the only visible sign of his illness, his clean-shaven scalp, which he prefers to keep covered with a baseball cap. "I don't deny having cancer, but I don't like being reminded of it."

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Between juggling weekly trips to doctors in New York, Coles has kept a full workload of classes — earning among the highest grades on English and Bible papers in his class.

A reflection of his self-avowed "stubborn" nature, Coles believes his attitude to his treatment has been to "keep positive," while looking to serve as a mentor for others like him by "teaching them some of the things I had to learn the hard way.

"When I look back in 20 years, I think I will have proved that I could take an active part in my treatment — that if things needed to be taken care of, I could do it myself," Coles said, recalling a time he went to his doctor's appointment in New York alone at 6 a.m. so that he could be back at school to catch his brother Taylor in a choir concert.

The balls of his cheeks surfacing as he grinned at his boldness, Coles added, "In the heat of things you don't find out how bad they are, and it's not until you stop that you realize how dangerous situations are. I wasn't ever really scared, my first reaction to being diagnosed was asking, 'what do I need to do?' "

When none of the Coles was found to be a suitable donor for a bone marrow transplant — as happens with 70 percent of family members attempting to match marrow — the family looked to the National Bone Marrow Donor Program, a registry containing more than four million donors.

No match was found.

So with the help of friends, neighbors and federal grants, the Coles took matters into their own hands and hosted a drive in early April that drew more than 500 local residents, including members of the University's women's rugby team. Tomorrow's drive being held at the Community Park School runs from 10 a.m. to 4 p.m.

Anyone could potentially be a match for Coles. But, according to the National Marrow Donor Program, people of similar ethnic background are most likely to match him. Thus a special effort has been made to publicize the event through the University's minority student groups, said one of the Coles' neighbors organizing the drive. In addition, all those who are tested on Saturday will enter the registry and could potentially be tapped to help others looking for donors.

"I believe the drives are not going to save just one life, Andrew's, but will save many," Robyn Coles noted. "Is it worth taking 15 minutes of your Saturday to save a life?"

And despite her son's cool-headed approach to coping with his illness, she has difficulty holding back the anxiety of seeing one of her boys so close to the edge.

"As a mother you would do anything for your children," she added. "I asked [people in the community] to think of Andrew as their child for a day."