By Jerry Revish
Walking with Chris through the garden his Worthington home, gave me a glimpse of how much he appreciates simple pleasures.
“These are daylilies, these are hydrangea,” he pointed out to me.
Watching them grow puts a smile on his face. He can’t dig in the soil or snip and prune like he normally does this time of year.
The cancer treatments have left him without much of an immune system right now. Mold and spores from the mulch and flowers heighten the risk of contact with germs and bacteria.
Over the course of his cancer treatment this past year, he lost 50 pounds, but he says he’s gained most of it back.
Chris is looking forward to the day when he can not only get his fingers back in the soil, but back on the computers in the weather center at 10TV.
“I can remember one on the first severe weather events that happened while I was at The James. The sirens were going off, there was a tornado warning for Franklin County and the nurses came in and shut the blinds in my hospital room. I immediately opened them back up! It’s hard watching the weather away from the newsroom,” he said.
But this time away from meteorology and the newsroom has given him the opportunity to enjoy something far greater, his family.
His daughter Maria just turned 11, his son Spencer is 13. Along with his husband, Jason, the family spends much more time together now.
One of their favorite pastimes after dinner weeknights is watching Wheel of Fortune as a family.
“I also love to get up and have breakfast with the kids in the morning,” Chris said. “That’s important to me, to be able to interact and spend time with them.”
Chris is on a regimen of 33 pills a day. They’re kept on a corner of the kitchen counter. Medicines that must be given to him by Jason at specific times throughout the day: 17 in the morning, four at noon, five in the evening and seven more at night.
Not all of them are cancer pills. Some are maintenance drugs to keep him healthy in other ways, until he gets into remission. Remission is when the cancer levels are down low enough to make a bone marrow transplant feasible.
Once doctors do that a transplant is ready to go. Chris already has a bone marrow donor lined up. Someone living in Germany with a very similar genetic profile.
It’s the medical procedure he’s pinning a lot of hope on for a cure.
“You basically kill your immune system, replace it with somebody else’s and hopefully get rid of the leukemia,” he said.
It remains his hope and prayer and the reason his family stays optimistic about the future.
“To Chris and I, our faith is very important and if I were to look back on this year. I would say that’s been the driving force for us…leaning into our faith,” Jason said.
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