Friday, March 16, 2007
Only once in Ben Parrott’s life did his family dog bite him. Butch, the multi-colored mutt with a notable underbite, put Parrott in the hospital for stitches to his lip six years ago. After routine blood work raised concerns, doctors sent him to Children’s Mercy Hospital to test his bone marrow.
Doctors told Parrott, then a 15-year-old student at Shawnee Mission North High School, he had a rapidly spreading cancer of the white blood cells called acute lymphocytic leukemia, or ALL.
When Parrott asked what his odds were, doctors gave him a 60 percent chance to live.
Since his diagnosis, Parrott had three and a half years of chemotherapy, a month of cranial radiation, pills, shots, spinal taps, ceaseless nausea and a fungal infection that spread to his lungs, liver, kidneys, spleen and behind his right eye. Doctors thought the infection would kill him. The infection, the treatments, and the cancer itself slowed him down, he said, but it didn’t stop him.
Parrott, Overland Park senior, now studies aerospace engineering at the University of Kansas. He is systems engineer in a team of aerospace students developing a soft landing prototype vehicle for Mars.
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The whole team has high spirits. We all think we can do it.
-Ben Parrott, Overland Park senior
“I came back and picked up where I left off like it never happened,” he said.
The student-designed Mars lander Parrott is helping design and build will have its first test landing at a local airfield on April 28. Some professors thought the project was too difficult for the students.
“The whole team has high spirits,” he said. “We all think we can do it.”
The Leukemia and Lymphoma Society’s Web site says there are almost 4,000 new cases of ALL every year in the United States; it is the most common type of leukemia for people younger than 19 years old.
Months before Parrott’s leukemia was diagnosed, he displayed warning signs. One afternoon, Parrott was too tired to walk home from work. Dizzy, his head swam. He sat down and passed out on the neighbor’s grass.
He was pulled out of school after his diagnosis that October, a month before he turned 16. Fifteen pills and a shot in the thigh was everyday business for Parrott. His spinal taps came weekly.
“School wasn’t a priority,” Parrott said. “It was survival.”
Parrott’s Mom, Debra James, a Sheldon, Mo. resident, said Parrott’s leukemia gave him a stick-to-it attitude and a strong personality.
“Put him in a room with strangers and they’ll gravitate toward him,” she said.
She spent 45 minutes getting Parrott to his treatment every day and most of her time by his bedside. Parrott called her his daily support system.
Parrott lost forty pounds that first December during radiation. All the while, his mom kept a vomit bucket in the car. Parrott said it was “easily the worst Christmas ever.”
The radiation machine, which looked like a large CAT scan tube, was in a large metal-lined vault. Parrott lay on his back as doctors put a plastic mesh mask on his face and bolted it to the table. He closed his eyes while the machine hummed, looking at the purple radiation glow that resonated. When his treatments ended, he threw away the plastic mesh mask. He was nauseous at the sight of it.
Parrott’s treatment continued until his freshman year of college. Since, he participated in microgravity research at Johnson Space Center in Houston, flying at zero gravity in a DC-9 “Weightless Wonder.” He plans to graduate from KU with an aerospace engineering degree this December.
He said he worked hard, lived selflessly, never took anything for granted and found happiness in everything to get where he is today, cancer-free and looking to his future.
“I don’t believe in miracles,” Parrott said, “but maybe that qualifies.”
Kansan staff writer Brian Lewis-Jones can be contacted at bljones@kansan.com.
— Edited by Will McCullough
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