I read the GQ article with great joy and forwarded it to several of my friends who are fraternity brothers. I was feeling that happy Greek glow and thought that would be it. Then last night I had dinner with a guy who was making fun of GLOs until he caught the look on my face. I stared at him and silently turned around so that he could read the "Kappa Kappa Gamma" on the back of my shirt. To his credit, he apologized profusely, then asked lots of questions and encouraged me to dispell the myths and counter his stereotypes. We had a long conversation about how the fraternity experience enhances both college and adult life. I wound up citing several points made in the article, especially the one about GLOs' teaching tolerance. At the end of our discussion, he said that I'd converted him. If his (as yet unconceived) children ever want to join a GLO, he said, he'll be all for it. Lifesaver, thanks for posting such a great article!
Now, here's the text to yet another Great Greeks article that appeared in the July 2002 issue of
Good Housekeeping. Here you can
download a PDF of the full article with pictures. It's a very sweet story and the pictures are really cute.
Micaela & Melanie
by Lily Bosch
When she's older, Micaela Ward may remember that Sunday as the longest day of her life. She was up at seven, too excited to sleep, with so many butterflies in her stomach she could hardly touch her breakfast. During church services that morning, the four-year-old girl couldn't help but squirm in her seat.
Vicky Ward understood. Her daughter was no stranger to long, drawn-out days. Since her leukemia diagnosis eight months earlier, Micaela had braved hospital stays, spinal taps, and rounds of chemotherapy with a composure far beyond her years. But this December day was dragging for a different, entirely joyful reason. Micaela was waiting for Melanie. And just thinking about Melanie made her forget her pain.
This was the day Melanie was due to arrive at the Wards' home in the tiny village of Chadbourn, North Carolina. Melanie is a dog-- a big, furry Great Pyrenees with extraordinary intelligence and dedication-- and she was coming all the way from Maine. Micaela's oncologist, Dr. Stuart Gold, had arranged for his young patient to get the dog in time for Christmas, setting in motion an elaborate convoy of college fraternity brothers who would transport Melanie 1,000 miles-- into Micaela's waiting arms.
That Sunday, an excited crowd of 175 relatives, friends, and neighbors gathered around Micaela's family: her mom and dad and siblings Charlton, 13, and Elizabeth, 20 months. A welcome banner made by Vicky and Micaela hung in the front yard of their 19th-century wood-frame house, and the well-wishers milled around it.
Promptly at three o'clock, a bronze Toyota Land Cruiser driven by a 21-year-old college senior, Matt McCuen, pulled up in front of the house, and the throng of people moved toward it. Suddenly shy, Micaela clung to her mother as the SUV's back hatch opened and the much-anticipated pooch emerged, looking decidedly more polar bear than dog.
"Melanie was huge and Micaela was a little overwhelmed," her mother recalls in a silky Southern drawl. "I told her to hold out her hand so Melanie would come. Then Micaela stroked the dog's fur, and Melanie seemed to realize that Micaela was the one."
Small for her age, her head nearly bald from cancer treatments, Micaela then wrapped her thin arms around the 85-pound shaggy white dog and said, "When I'm weak, she'll make me feel right."
It was a deeply rewarding moment for Micaela's parents, who had stood by, feeling powerless, for so long. Their worries had begun a year earlier, when Micaela got sick, dropping weight and becoming weak. The family pediatrician checked her several times and saw nothing more serious than a slow recovery from the flu.
But on April 8, 2001, at an Easter egg hunt, Vicky made a terrible discovery. "When I picked Micaela up, her legs looked dirty," Vicky says. "I was surprised, because she is very prissy. So I looked closer, and it was not dirt. Those were little tiny bruises beneath the skin."
Alarmed, the Wards took her to the local hospital emergency room. That night, the doctor on call broke the news: Micaela's blood counts were so "totally out of whack" it appeared that she had leukemia. The Wards were stricken-- but immediately vowed to get their little girl the best medical care available. At six o'clock the next morning, they left Chadbourn to drive three and a half hours to a leading hospital in Chapel Hill. There, specialists confirmed the diagnosis of acute lymphoblastic leukemia (ALL).
The next several months were wrenching for the whole family. Dad Richard, who manages a plumbing and electrics store, stayed in Chadbourn with Elizabeth and Charlton. Vicky gave up her catering business to be with Micaela in the hospital while she underwent intensive chemotherapy and radiation. The treatment left Micaela racked with nausea, stomach cramps, and excruciating aches in her large muscles. She was so debiliated she could no longer walk. "My four-year-old was crawling and my 13-month-old was walking," Vicky says.
But there was reason to hope: the Wards learned that ALL, the most common type of childhood cancer, has a cure rate of about 75 percent. Moreover, "Because of Micaela's age and white blood cell count when she was diagnosed, her prognosis was even better," says Dr. Gold, who also teaches at the University of North Carolina.
To Dr. Gold, Micaela is an extraordinary child. "She was such a brave little girl, with wisdom beyond her years," he says. Dr. Gold hepled Vicky keep up Micaela's spirits: For example, when the child's hair fell out, they threw her a party, telling her it meant the medicine was working. "We even put glitter on her noggin," Vicky recalls.
In general, Vicky adds, "We have tried to avoid anything that would traumatize Micaela. We don't use the word
cancer. We don't say she is sick. We are trying to keep her a normal child."
But during Micaela's first week of hospitalization at Chapel Hill, there was a setback on the home front. The Wards' dog, a mixed Chow named Maxine (nickname: Max), had vanished from their yard. "When Micaela came home, she was very sad," Vicky says. "We looked for the dog, put up missing-puppy posters, checked the pound. Micaela kept asking, 'Mama, do you think we'll ever find Max?' It was hard, but there was so much else going on. I'd say, 'Maybe someday we can get another puppy,' or 'Maybe Max will come home.'" She never did.
Then, during the first week of December 2001-- some eight months after the leukemia diagnosis-- the Wards brought Micaela to a six-week-long chemotherapy session at the North Carolina Lineberger Comprehensive Cancer Center, in Chapel Hill. There Micaela met Bear, a Great Pyrenees pet-therapy dog who visits hospitalized children. On the day Bear visited, Micaela was isolated in her hospital room because her blood counts were very low, meaning she was susceptible to infection. But Dr. Gold thought meeting a gentle, protective dog could help Micaela, so he arranged for his little patient to wear a mask. "Bear was gorgeous-- all buffed, puffed, and groomed, just beautiful, with lots of massive long white hair." Vicky says. "Micaela lit up. From then on, "She started talking about Bear and didn't stop."
The next time Dr. Gold examined her, Micaela was still chattering about her canine friend. "I think Micaela needs a dog," he told Vicky. She nodded but didn't think the doctor would make it his business to find the famliy an animal. But she underestimated Dr. Gold's dediaction-- and his enthusiasm for Great Pyrenees dogs, originally bred in the mountains of France to guard herds of sheep.
With the help of Bear's trainer, Dr. Gold began to search the Internet for a dog who would be right for Micaela. Within two weeks he located a beeder named Melanie Nadeau, who had 15 Great Pyrenees on her farm in Farminton, Maine. At that moment Nadeau was looking for a home for a three-year-old trained therapy dog with a gift for helping people. Named after the trainer herself, Melanie the dog could open doors and cabinets; she had even saved a life, alerting a woman that her husband had had a heart attack and was unconscious. (A rescue squad was called, and he survived.)
Melanie and Micaela seemed like a perfect match-- except for one problem: How to get the giant dog from Maine to North Carolina in time for Christmas, less than two weeks away. Dr. Gold tried to arrange a flight, but the travel requirements for such a dog made things very difficult, not to mention expensive. It was during a talk with a friend involved in the
Hole in the Wall Gang-- a charity started by Paul Newman for children with cancer-- that Dr. Gold found his solution.
Contact was made with the
Phi Kappa Tau Fraternity, which works with the Hole in the Wall camps. A posting went up on the fraternity Web site, calling for members to help transport a pooch down the East Coast in a relay of several-hour stints. Within days, 20 fraternity volunteers materialized.
The Great Pyrenees Road Trip began on Friday afternoon, December 21, under cold, gray skies. Nadeau bathed and groomed Melanie, packed a knapsack with some tools and treats, and readied the dog's giant cage. The first driver, Josh Masse, a Virginia Wesleyan University student from Brunswick, Maine, arrived in the early afternoon at the Nadeau farm to pick up his precious passenger. "She jumped right into the boy's car and he had a friend," Nadeau reports.
Masse took Melanie home with him to spend the night and prepare for an early start on Saturday. The first leg of the odyssey took them three and a half hours south on I-95 to a rest stop off Exit 6 in Massachusetts. There, at 11:00 am, Masse met fraternity brother Chris Conrad, a student at the College of New Jersey. Conrad loaded up Melanie for the five-hour drive to his home in Atco, New Jersey. At 5:00 pm another fraternity brother, Jeff Gonzales, who attends Shepherd College, picked up Melanie and made her at home in his car for the four-hour drive to Todd Pearson's home in Ashburn, Virginia.
There, Melanie spent the night calm in her cage. In the morning, joined by fraternity brother Bill Hoisington, Pearson embarked on the 190-mile trip to Emporia, Virginia, near the North Carolina border. Waiting at a state information center was Matt McCuen, a student at Franklin & Marshall College, who would take the dog on the final leg of her journey.
But here the relay hit a little snag: McCuen's Mazda 929 wasn't roomy enough for the mighty Melanie. "I didn't realize how huge this dog would be," McCuen says. "So I went home and got my mom's SUV. The whole trip, Melanie wanted to get in the front seat with me. She was very affectionate, just like a big, soft bear."
Still, McCuen was jittery about his mission. "It was nerve-racking," he says. "I wanted everything to be perfect." That's why the moment when Micaela hugged Melanie was as good as a thousand thank-yous. "It made me so happy to be able to do a good thing like this," McCuen says.
From the beginning, Micaela and Melanie were best buddies. Vicky observed the dog's devoted vigil over her daughter with amazement: "I was up late doing Christmas things, and I noticed that every 45 minutes the dog would get up from my feet and go check on Micaela as she slept."
The routine has continued since. "If Melanie hears Micaela making noises in her sleep, she goes and lies by her side until Micaela settles down," Vicky says. "Every so often she puts her face up to Micaela's and makes sure she's breathing OK. She doesn't lick; she is checking."
Dr. Gold is delighted with the way things have turned out. "When Micaela has a rough day, Melanie lightens her up," he says. "The love is tangible."
Hopefully, Micaela's roughest days are over. Dr. Gold reports that her cancer is now in remission, and he expects her to fully recover. When her current series of chemotherapy sessions is complete, she'll receive maintenance therapy for two years-- intravenous medications once a month and oral medications every day.
Every once in a while, Vicky Ward rereads the letter that Melanie's breeder sent with the dog on her journey from Maine. "A piece of my heart I now give to you," it says. "Each puppy I breed, each puppy I raise, is done with care and love.... Please love and care for her. She is there for you. Spread smiles and love to others too. When you're feeling bad or just feeling blue, a hug from her will make you feel better. Enjoy and love her."
Which is exactly what the family is doing.
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