HOW TO GO
What: Sisters United for Prevention’s 12th Annual Awareness Fashion Show & Luncheon
When: 11:30 a.m. Saturday, May 7
Where: Clark County Fairgrounds Champions Center.
Tickets: $30, reserve by calling Young Hair, 324-4301.
On a mid-April Sunday much like this in 2002, a shocked and reeling Love Poling-Taylor sat in Dayton Children’s Hospital as its medical staff ran tests to confirm what they suspected: That her son, born the third day that April, had cancer.
Last week, Poling-Taylor drove now 14-year-old Charles Taylor to a Springfield shop to be fitted for the tuxedo he’ll wear May 7 in the survivors’ fashion show that’s an annual feature of the Sisters United for Prevention’s Awareness Fashion Show and Luncheon.
This year’s medical speaker, called on to address the importance of prevention, early detection and screening of cancers is Darrell M. Gray, II, a gastroenterologist and the deputy director for the Center for Cancer Health Equity at The Ohio State University Comprehensive Cancer Center – James Cancer Hospital and Solove Research Institute.
Although not possessed of as impressive a resume as Dr. Gray, it’s hard to imagine organizers could find a person with better credentials that Poling-Taylor to address the crucial roles family, friends and faith play in enduring the affliction.
“Everything was a shock at first,” said the 1992 graduate of South High School.
Although Charles’ abdomen seemed swollen at a check-up two weeks after his birth at Springfield’s Community Hospital, “nothing was said” about its being an issue, Poling-Taylor recalled.
The following Sunday, however, she and her sister, Monica Richardson, were concerned enough about the increased swelling that they took him to Dayton Children’s, a timely choice.
Although confident they knew the cause, the medical staff “started his chemo even before they confirmed it was cancer,” Poling said.
They did so because the tumor swelling in his kidney was overcrowding Charles’ abdomen and pressing on his lungs and other organs.
“The medicine they gave him shrunk the tumor,” she said, “and they said as long as (the cancer) didn’t spread he wouldn’t have to have surgery.”
Although that certainly was good news, her ability to hear it was impaired by the echoes of the words “tumor” and “cancer.”
“As soon as you hear ‘cancer,’ you think of it as a death sentence,” Poling-Taylor said.
When treatment began, the woman who had expected to have her child wrapped in her arms instead saw through a jumble of tubes and paraphernalia necessary for his care.
“He had everything on him,” she said, and was so swollen with fluids that he weighed 20 pounds at six weeks of age.
His condition “was a scary thing just to look at.”
At a time she had been expecting to be reciting childhood rhymes to him, she also found herself “bombarded with a whole lot of information” to the point of being overwhelmed.
The experience forever changed her life.
“Having five boys at the time, my focus mainly was on work and making sure we had enough money,” said Poling-Taylor, a beautician and hair stylist.
Although “family was always a big thing to us,” she said, the crisis taught her in a way nothing else could its underlying importance.
“Family will just come in when you need them. His dad and I had an awesome support system.”
Her sister and brother-in-law, Monica and Arrick Richardson, and her mother, Estelle Grimes, were particularly helpful.
Because “the only thing I could do is be there for (Charles),” Poling-Taylor said, “the rest of my family surrounded me and did what I couldn’t.”
“That’s what I try to instill in the boys,” she added. “You don’t have the power to do everything, but God will place (help) in your life.”
Relying on others “doesn’t make you weak,” she also tells them, “it makes you stronger.”
And strength was required.
“He was actually in intensive care for six weeks. And after he got released, he had to go back to the hospital three days every three weeks and every week one day in between, and he did that for a year.”
Checkups then came yearly after that for a while and now are required every five years.
After looking up the spelling of neuroblastoma on a Smart Phone last week, Charles Taylor, now a seventh grader at Huber Heights’ Weisenborn Middle School, said the expected: That he remembers nothing from his days with that form of cancer.
A slender 5-foot-7 and 130 pounds, the young man who plays point guard and wide receiver bears only three small scars from his treatment, one on his right side; one on his upper left chest, where a port was inserted; and one above the femoral artery of his right leg.
When his mother first told him about the episode, “I didn’t really believe her,” he said. “I was shocked.”
“I just think I’m lucky” he went on to say. “(God) helped me survive. He brought me through. I think of how thankful I am for surviving.”
Because pictures from that time were oddly the only thing stolen in a robbery, Poling-Taylor’s recollections of it are the family’s main point of reference.
She remembers her son being “amazing.”
“He was always a kid through it. He would smile, and he’s been that kind of kid ever since.”
She also sees the experience as “a faith journey” during which God, at some point, calmed and slowed her mind to the point where she was able to tell herself: “We’re going to get through this storm.”
Although she’s lived and worked in Huber Heights for years now, her connections with Springfield were and remain important.
She said her faith was nurtured at Greater Grace Temple.
Her career doing hair, which connected her to another caring community, goes back to her after school job at Gingery salon, where sister Monica worked, and whose owner Patty Young now operates Young Hair.
“Patty’s shop was the salon,” Poling-Taylor said. “To work there, to go there, just to be involved with Patty was one of the ‘it’ things in Springfield.”
That same quality allowed Young to be the catalyst in creating Sisters United, whose 12th annual event will welcome a young man in a tuxedo who is the picture of health 14 years after being born with cancer.
About the Author