Casey McAlister is in the Bone Marrow Transplant Unit at Children's Hospital, hoping the peculiar and confounding chemistry of the human body is going to flatter him with a very big break. Pray for him. Then hug your kids.

Casey is 3. Since being diagnosed last July 30 with leukemia, he has been in the hospital some 200 days. He has had radiation therapy and chemotherapy. He has swallowed a pharmacy's worth of pills. He has been stuck with more needles than a voodoo doll. When the time finally came June 20 for the bone marrow transplant, he wasn't scared. The procedure was just like a blood transfusion. He has had plenty of those.

Casey's father says leukemia is messing with the wrong kid. The bully picked one too many fights and now he will pay. This is what Lance McAlister believes. It's what he has to believe, every night, from about 6:15, until 10 the next morning, when he is in his son's sterile hospital room, attempting sleep on a pullout couch, hearing the tortuous beep of the heart monitor and hoping beyond hope this whole bad dream has a happy ending.

Casey McAlister has beaten leukemia for a year. (Special to the Enquirer) | ZOOM |

You haven't known terror until you've spent one night in a hospital room with your very sick child. How must it feel to spend 200 of them there? The beeps, hums and whooshes of the machines, the bright light of the room, at once garish and antiseptic. The frozen panic when a beep stops or a whoosh slows. The tightening in your throat, the reflexive widening of your eyes as you call for a nurse. The unique helplessness of it all. Hospitals aren't supposed to be places for bright, happy 3-year-old boys.

But here's something else. Here's something you might never know until your kid is seriously ill: the kindness of strangers, the love of people for one another, the steely, invincible spirit of your own flesh and blood. Casey McAlister is a hope and a wish that we would all be so brave in the dark.

He has thrilled all who know him with his courage, his wit and his grace. Recently, after Casey threw up seven or eight times in a three-hour evening stretch, a reaction to chemotherapy, Lance said a prayer and tucked his child in bed.

"We'll have a better day tomorrow," Lance told his son.

"Did I have a bad day today?" Casey asked.

Lance thought Casey had beaten leukemia. Until April, when it showed up again in the bones of his cheek and jaw, Lance McAlister believed his son was the miracle kid on whom the sun would shine forever. McAlister talks sports during the afternoon drive on WCKY-AM (1360). He has a segment each week called "I Believe Wednesday." It's a time for callers to announce their most staunchly held feelings about sports.

McAlister has trouble feeling too deeply about sports now. He believes Pete Rose belongs in the Hall of Fame. He believes soccer is a communist plot to corrupt America's youth. Mainly, he believes leukemia made a mistake in taking on his 3-year-old child.

That belief became both harder and hardened by the latest news.

Resolute and resilient

"I believed we wouldn't have to deal with it anymore," Lance says. Doctors have told Lance and his wife, Kelly, that the transplant has a 10 to 20 percent chance to succeed. Success rates are higher if the marrow comes from immediate family members. Neither Lance nor Kelly nor Casey's 1-year-old sister, Peyton, was a match. The marrow used was less than a perfect match.

"When you hear 10 to 20 percent," Lance says, "you start thinking in the context of what should we do now that we might not get to do down the road."

After a day of tears, the McAlisters did what they've done every day for the last 11-plus months: They tugged their battle helmets low and went back to war. "Some odds are better than no odds," McAlister says. "He has done so well to this point, you have to skew the odds differently for this kid."

The three weeks after the transplant are critical. Casey is finishing his second week. So far, so smooth. The fear now is GVH disease: Graft versus Host, which is a fancy way of saying everyone is waiting to see if Casey's body rejects its new marrow. That would be evident by a persistent rash on his hands and feet.

Right now, the only thing persistent is the family's persistence. Front and center is Casey McAlister. Never call an athlete a hero again without thinking of this kid. "I don't know how he does it," Lance says.

Casey has made Lance "a better father, a better husband and a better talk show host. I don't have bad days anymore," Lance says. "It would be an insult to Casey to say I did."

Blessings and curses

Life takes on a crystalline, beautiful urgency when you're living it on the margin, a day at a time. My daughter has Down syndrome. I felt awful about that when she was born. Six weeks later, she was back in the hospital, a tiny figure in a huge bed, centered in a nest of tubes running this way and that, the dreaded heart monitor beating a horrible cadence for her diminished life.

She had bronchiolitis and it was choking her to death. Jillian was dying to breathe, and in those moments when the doctors surrounded her bed, I prayed that Down syndrome was all she had.

She lived. Yet another needle provoked in her a mighty, I've-had-enough wail, miraculously dislodging a wad of mucous from her chest. Now, she's almost 14 and I think about the nine days she lived in the hospital every day of my life.

Casey McAlister has had 200 days like that. Blessings and curses dance together in the hospital rooms of sick children. This time, let the last dance be a blessing.

Casey McAlister is in the Bone Marrow Transplant Unit at Children's Hospital, hoping the peculiar and confounding chemistry of the human body is going to flatter him with a very big break. Pray for him. Then hug your kids.

E-mail pdaugherty@enquirer.com

Read Daugherty's previous column on Casey McAlister