A diagnosis that rearranged a family’s life
Life comes at you fast and it comes at you hard. There’s no point pretending you aren’t vulnerable, baby, because you are. And when the fates deliver a blow right between the eyes and you sag to the floor, you either stay down or you get back up.
Rich and Andrea Dunn have been staggered about as badly as parents can be. Their son Julian’s bouts last year with weight loss, vomiting and headaches didn’t subside. They couldn’t be wished away and they didn’t go away.
Then on Dec. 5, an MRI revealed a tangerine-sized tumor attached to Julian’s brain stem. Two days earlier, he’d sat on Santa’s lap. Three months earlier, he’d turned 5.
And then the process that has visited millions of other parents began. Doctors began explaining things to the Dunns, both in their mid-40s. They handed them tissues for tears and walked them through the prognosis and what lay ahead. The Dunns understood radiation and chemotherapy, but then got further jolted when the talk shifted to potential long-term health complications that, even if Julian beat the cancer, would have an effect on his life.
And as parents have done down through the years, the Dunns digested what they could. And they realize that only parents who have gone through it can imagine what it’s like when you first hear a diagnosis like that.
“Somebody said life stops,” Rich says in his living room Thursday morning. “That’s not true at all. It doesn’t stop. It keeps going.”
And so parents keep going. The Dunns now are a month-and-a-half into it. The 38 straight nights that Andrea spent in the hospital with Julian ended last week. But he’s still awakening before dawn every morning and, with his mother, going to Children’s Hospital for radiation treatments that’ll end next month. They don’t get back home until late morning. When radiation ends, the regimen shifts to weekly chemotherapy, expected to last through the year.
Rich holds down the fort at home and tries to maintain a writing schedule that includes a book about a high school football team and other freelance assignments. And there’s the serious business of being a father to Nolan, who turns 8 next week. Andrea, also a writer who had worked at home with Rich, spends much of her time tending to Julian and has let her workload virtually disappear.
In the midst of all this, however, they have a vision, one that makes them smile and think of better things. It’s the vision of a Saturday afternoon in March at Newport Mesa Church, when they’ll sponsor the “Jammin’ for Julian” pop music concert. Open to musicians and singers from preschool through 6th grade, the March 21 event will be a fundraiser to help ease the family’s coming financial burdens. People wanting information can phone the Dunns at (949) 752-5223 or e-mail them at dunnwriter@yahoo.com.
I ask Rich what he pictures that afternoon. “The house is gonna rock,” he says, brightening. “Part of Julian’s therapy is that he’s going to be learning to play the keyboards and piano. And one day little Julian, who loves music and to sing and is the sweetest human being on the face of the Earth, one day he’s going to play that event.”
The Dunns want the concert to become an annual thing, with future proceeds going to a Children’s Hospital of Orange County fund to help other families. “What I envision,” Rich says, “is a lot of families and a lot of kids and a lot of joy, just a jammin’ place where music is appreciated and kids and families are appreciated.”
In the meantime, life is being rearranged for the Dunns, who live in Newport Beach but not in the ritzy part. Rich describes them as working-class people, and their modest home is just off the retail and fast food restaurant strip of southeast Bristol Street.
They are religious people. Rich sees Julian’s situation as a test for the family, one that will make the steel in them stronger for having been in the furnace. Far from blaming God, Rich is intent on using the experience to glorify Him by how he handles it and also to impart lessons to young Nolan about dealing with fear and adversity. He is careful, he says, not to let Nolan see him cry.
I ask Rich what the hardest part is. He collects himself and says, “I’d say the mornings. Julian has to get up early, leave the house by 6:30. It’s still dark out, he knows the sun’s not up and he has to leave home. When he says, ‘I don’t want to go to the hospital today.’ ”
Rich chokes up at that reference, but almost as if to will himself and Julian to fight back, says: “He’s going to have to be resilient, get used to it, suck it up and deal with it. And I know he will.”
Later, he says hearing Julian’s laments is “like a dagger in the side. There’s nothing you can do about it but sit there and take it as a father.”
The Dunns have no idea what the ultimate medical costs will be. They have insurance, but no one has worked up the numbers for them yet.
Five-year survival rates are in Julian’s favor, but residual effects from the intense yearlong treatments probably will exact a toll in the years ahead. For now, that isn’t the focus. To the contrary, Rich says he’s looking forward to coaching Julian in Little League someday.
But that is for a day down the road.
These days, with the Christmas tree still up because Julian missed it in December and because he enjoys sitting in front of it, the Dunns are still remaking their lives. They’re scrambling to compensate for the loss of Andrea’s billable hours, which had been the family’s dominant income source. They’re learning to accept the kindness not only of friends and relatives, but of strangers.
An old-school father who considers himself the family’s protector and provider, Rich has learned lessons about swallowing pride and being humble.
And he has learned to appreciate simple things.
Having asked him about the toughest moments in the day, I later ask about the best. He admits that writing his book on the 1994 Newport Harbor High CIF football champs provides much-needed escape and therapy.
Then he turns more inward, and that becomes the second and only other time he chokes up. “I’d say any time I see Julian laugh or smile,” he says. “Any time my wife and I can laugh and smile.”
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dana.parsons@latimes.com
