The events of the last eight or nine months have altered Gavin Brunin’s career plans.
“I want to be a nurse,” the Avondale 5-year-old says. “If I was a nurse, I could help other kids get rid of their bad blood, too.”
Gavin’s “bad blood” was put into his tiny body by juvenile myelomonocytic leukemia (JMML) — a form of cancer that’s so rare “it is found in only 1 percent of 1 percent of all childhood leukemias,” said Gavin’s father, Mike Brunin.
“So it’s like we won the lottery,” he added. “The bad lottery.”
Still, the Brunins have tackled every challenge their son’s illness has thrown at them so far, and they’re prepared to wrestle all comers to the ground, too.
“People ask me, ‘How do you do it?’” said Gavin’s mother, Mashawn. “Well, you just do it. You have to. You have a 5-year-old. You do what you need to do.”
When Gavin was born, he was, by all appearances, nearly perfect. “He was jaundiced, but nothing out of the ordinary,” his mother remembered.
The boy’s health did not become extraordinary until May 2004, when he developed “three big, raspberry-looking spots on his chest,” Mashawn said. “I thought it was just dry skin, so I lotioned them up. They went away — but four or five of them came back about a month later, and they started spreading to his back.”
Several months later, in October, Mashawn found a lump on the back of Gavin’s head. She promptly took her son to the family’s pediatrician to have it checked out.
“When the doctor said he didn’t like the looks of one of Gavin’s blood-test results, he sent us to Phoenix Children’s Hospital,” Mashawn said. “My heart dropped as soon as I heard ‘Phoenix Children’s Hospital.’”
At first, PCH specialists thought Gavin’s lump was caused by the flu-like illness mononucleosis. But when that and several other possibilities were ruled out, Gavin was officially diagnosed with JMML, a cancer of the myeloid cells in the bone marrow.
Survival rate: 25 percent.
Looking at the now
“I was devastated,” Mashawn said. “It’s like my whole world fell out from under me.”
“It was a kick in the gut is what it was,” Mike said. “At the very instant you hear the word ‘cancer’ in relation to your child, your life changes.
“Before we heard that word, we’d looked forward to having a motor home, a boat. But at that instant, everything changed. We weren’t looking to the future anymore,” he said. “We had to look at the now. All we could do at that point was to ask, ‘OK. What’s next?’”
The answer, implemented within 24 hours, was the first of two five-day rounds of chemotherapy Gavin would have to undergo, followed by the removal of the boy’s spleen (“A lot of times, JMML can hide out in there,” Mike explained), followed by a worldwide search for a bone marrow donor.
Only three potential donors were found: one in England, one in Germany and one in the Brunin home. Gavin’s 23-month-old brother, Aiden, turned out to be a 100 percent match. “That jumped Gavin up from a 25 percent survival rate to a 35 percent survival rate,” Mike said.
A few hours after the May 31 transplant, Gavin rose from his hospital bed, crossed the room and put his arms around the sleeping Aiden.
“He said, ‘Thank you for giving me your bone marrow, brother,’” Mashawn recalled. “It still makes me want to cry whenever I think of it.”
‘It’s tough on everybody’
In addition to his daily battles with JMML, Gavin must endure other medical challenges. Just last week, doctors found a blood clot in the boy’s heart. “But it’s not life-threatening at this time,” said Mike, who with Mashawn must give his little boy two injections of blood-thinning drugs every day.
The one benefit of being forced to focus all their concerns on Gavin, Mike and Mashawn have found, has been that they have no time left to fret over the $50,000 that will eventually have to come out of their pockets to pay their share of the boy’s medical bills.
Mike, a full-time reservist with the 944th Fighter Wing at Luke Air Force Base, has family health insurance, but it won’t cover all the expenses. And upon Gavin’s diagnosis, Mashawn had no choice but to leave her job at a local tire store.
But they aren’t complaining.
“My unit has been so great,” Mike said. “Because I’m not full-time, people started donating their vacation time to me. I had 580 hours donated to me in the first 24 hours. And the civilians on the active-duty side were donating leave, too.”
Also, long-time family friends such as Avondale’s Brian Bloomer have organized two fund-raising golf tournaments, including one which last weekend raised about $1,500 at the Palm Valley Golf Course in Goodyear. Next, Bloomer hopes to organize a three-on-three basketball tournament.
Meanwhile, “Gavin is doing well,” Mashawn said. “He just can’t be running and jumping or doing anything where he might get bumped or bruised. He can’t be in the sun at all for the next year. But we go outside at night so he can ride his bike.”
“It’s tough,” Mike said. “It’s really tough. It’s tough on your marriage, it’s tough on your family, it’s tough on everybody.”
“You’ve just got to take it one day at a time,” Mashawn said. “Something like this teaches you that life is too short to mess around.”
Mike Burkett can be reached by e-mail at mburkett@westvalleyview.com.
How to help
To help Mike and Mashawn Brunin family with their son’s medical bills, donations may be deposited at any Bank of America branch to “Children’s Organ Transplant Association for Gavin B.,” account No. 4687280346.
For information, call Brian Bloomer at 623-696-5230, or visit www.gavinbrunin on the Internet.
