Published in: South Florida Parenting Magazine
Celebrating Life, One Birthday at a Time
By KiKi Bochi
There will be the obligatory bounce house, games, prizes and food at the first birthday celebration for Anthony Michael Stephen Hruska. In that way, this party won’t be different from so many others.
The difference is that Baby Anthony — Bubba to those who love him – won’t be there. He never made it to his big day. A rare and aggressive form of cancer claimed his life the day after he turned 10 months old.
His family is having a party anyway—and they want South Floridians to help commemorate the life of a sweet baby boy whose reddish tuft of hair only hinted at his strength.
Bubba’s family and friends are hosting the community event in hopes of raising funds so that others might be spared the agony they and their little boy endured. They’ve even formed a non-profit organization, the Bubba Love Foundation, to further their cause.
“I can’t sleep at night, knowing that there are other parents out there who are going through what we went through, other kids out there, beautiful babies, who are receiving this diagnosis and death sentence,” says his mom, Lisa Contessa, a real estate sales associate in Delray Beach.
The diagnosis was Atypical Teratoid Rhabdoid Tumor, a rare, high-grade tumor that occurs most commonly in children younger than 2. It is generally found in the cerebellum, which is the lower, back part of the brain that controls balance. These tumors tend to be aggressive and frequently spread through the central nervous system.
This type of tumor was not recognized until 1997. Currently there is no standard treatment protocol. It is so rare, it occurs in about 1-2 percent of children with brain tumors.
Lisa Contessa believes she might still have her little boy to love and hold if doctors had recognized how sick he was. As she explains her story, she and her husband, Anthony Hruska, began taking him to the doctor in April and were told their son had a virus. She says she knew, deep inside, that “something was very wrong.” When one side of Baby Anthony’s face became paralyzed, the parents panicked and demanded to see specialists. The specialists simply reviewed the original misdiagnosis and confirmed it. One doctor ordered further tests; another rescinded those orders.
The uncertainty went on for two months while the family helplessly watched their son deteriorate. They ended up in the emergency room on July 4th, where a CT scan detected a brain tumor. Baby Anthony was transported immediately from there to Joe Dimaggio Children’s Hospital, where the tumor was removed surgically.
“We went there with so much hope,” Lisa Contessa writes in her online journal, “Hope that we would be taking Bubba home so he could grow up healthy and strong.”
After three weeks of poking, restraining, IVs, needles, machines, tubes, testing, and operations, it was determined that there was no hope. Anthony Michael Stephen Hruska was sent home on a Monday. He died less than a week later on his parents’ bed. Just one month had elapsed since he was taken to the emergency room, and he was gone.
Almost immediately after the funeral, Lisa Contessa went to work to help other families like hers. ATRT is such a rare form of cancer, she had spent countless hours when Bubba was in the hospital sitting at the computer researching expert doctors, treatment options and protocols, experimental therapy, medical studies and terms, even painful statistics and stories of other families. It was time that she wished she had spent sitting with her son.
To make it easier for others, she decided to create a website on which all of the information they found would be linked together.
How did she find the energy to deal with her grief, the bill collectors, her job, and Baby Anthony’s four-year-old sister, Olivia?
“How do you deal with this? No one knows. No one knows what to say, or what questions to ask,” she explains. “We just have to go on. To sit around and wallow in our self-pity is not going to help anyone...
“I can’t just put it behind me and say he’s dead now,” she says, her voice cracking with emotion. “He’s gone, but I know he was here for a reason. Even if this was not the reason, I am going to make it the reason. I can’t go on for the rest of my life and say to myself that my son is gone for nothing.”
And so the family decided that Baby Anthony’ birthday should be reason for celebration. The community party will be held on Nov. 27, even though that is a little past Bubba’s real birthday.
“We just didn’t have enough time, after losing him and burying him, to plan a party that quickly,” his mother explains.
Bubba’s dad, an executive chef, lost his job after he asked for the day off on his son’s actual birthday of Oct. 6. But that didn’t stop the family, friends and a group of neighbors from holding their own private ceremony.
In a park near their home, they released 306 balloons and watched them float silently toward the heavens. One balloon for each day of Anthony Michael Stephen Hruska’s life.
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