Lucca Pritsch underwent cancer surgery to remove a portion of one kidney followed by seven months of chemotherapy. He had been diagnosed with a Wilms tumor when he was 22 months old, and at age 3, the family was breathing a sigh of relief.
Until a follow-up scan found a tumor on one of his lungs, consistent with a relapse of Wilms tumor.
“And then we had to restart everything,” said his mother, Tatiane. “Oh, that was hard. That was hard. The first one compared to the second one was horrible.”
The relapse diagnosis kicked off another round of treatment, but this one even more grueling. Chemotherapy treatments left Lucca weak and unable to eat. The family spent their time traveling between home, the clinic and Prisma Health BI-LO Charities Children’s Cancer Center.
“We had to find strength where there is no strength to find,” she said. “But then, once you find that, you just go. You go with the flow. You just keep going because they need you.”
Lucca’s immune system was so suppressed that it was dangerous for him to be around others.
“He couldn’t see anybody,” Tatiane said. “We couldn’t meet friends because he could catch any kind of virus that for us would be a normal virus … but for him could cause a lifethreatening emergency.”
Compounding the family’s concerns, Lucca’s younger sister, Caroline, was born with a benign vascular tumor (infantile hemangioma) near her eye that doctors feared could lead to impaired eyesight. Unable to surgically remove the tumor due to its proximity to her eye, doctors treated the condition with medicine and she has responded well.
So, it came as an enormous boost when a social worker connected the family with Clement’s Kindness, which offered not only financial support but a network of families with young children facing similar challenges.
For the Pritsch family, it meant the world “to be around kids, to be with his friends, because at that time the only friends that he had were the kids from the clinic, the kids from the hospital, the kids from the cancer center, the kids from the oncology center,” Tatiane said.
“For us, it was like leaving that bubble that we used to live in and having a little bit of fun, even if it was for one hour or an hour and a half,” she said. “We became family to other families and friends, because we faced the same thing, and it was so nice.”
Tatiane said Lucca has been cancer-free for three years now but faces long-term side effects such as kidney and asthma issues.
