Flagler
Jed Michal, valedictorian of the Class of 2006 in this Colorado farm town, looked at the other 18 students in the senior class and delivered a graduation speech that none of them will ever forget.
The future has arrived, he told them. Our time is now. And he said this: “Live every day as if it was your last. For it may very well be.”
Many of his friends and classmates cried then. Because as high school ended and the journey that would be their lives began, no one knew if Jed Michal would be going with them.
Michal has leukemia. His friends gathered in the high school gymnasium for graduation last Sunday. Michal spoke to them through an Internet hookup from his hospital room at the M.D. Anderson Cancer Center in Houston. He saw his classmates on a monitor. They saw him on a movie screen.
“Life is just life,” he told them. “There are no guarantees.”
The cancer came first in 2004, announcing its dark arrival by pounding Michal (pronounced Mitchell) with night sweats and a headache. A kid raised on hard work, he suddenly had trouble breathing after the smallest of chores.
On Sept. 3 of that year, he asked his mother to take him to the doctor. There was a tumor in a lung. He endured eight months of brutal chemotherapy. The cancer, he was told, was in remission. He had missed 119 days of school during his junior year, and now he had some work to do. He made up the missing work in about 60 days last summer. Those who knew him best were not surprised.
A fighting spirit
For his father, Jim, who stayed behind to run the farm when his wife, Beverly, and Jed settled into the Houston medical center, the words come hard.
“Even when he was a baby, he did things different,” Jim said. “When he was still in his crib, he’d go to bed with books. Some nights his light would be on. He could reach the switch from his crib. I’d go in there and he’d be sitting up with his books in his lap, reading. I’d leave him alone. When he was done, he’d shut off his light and go to sleep.”
By the end of last July, Jed had caught up to his classmates. Life restarted.
“I did normal things again,” he said last week from the hospital. “I went back to school. And I worked on the farm.”
In February, the hammer came down again. His face went numb. Spinal-fluid tests showed the cancer had come back. And a tough kid hit bottom.
Even with treatment, “doctors told me this time that I had just a 20 percent chance of survival,” said Michal, 19. “That didn’t sound very good. There’s only so much a person can do. I didn’t want to fight anymore.”
He asked the doctors what he could expect without treatment.
“They said I had maybe three months.”
But doctors in Colorado gave Michal one more chance. They suggested the Anderson Cancer Center in Houston. He went for tests in March. They said a bone marrow transplant would give him a 50 percent chance of survival.
“They made me want to fight again,” he said.
His brothers, Joe, John and Jake, underwent bone marrow tests. John, 25, was a match. The transplant took place in Houston two weeks ago.
“It seemed like we couldn’t do anything for him,” John said. “Suddenly I got the chance. Doctors gave me, Joe and Jake these three-ring binders with information about bone marrow transplants so we could decide whether we even wanted to be tested. I never opened the book. My brothers didn’t either. It didn’t matter. It was time to help.”
Jed undergoes daily white blood-cell tests. On Wednesday the blood-cell count jumped a bit. There was hope that the marrow transplant was working.
Help pours in
Back on the farm, a father waits.
“Some days are OK, and some days are not so good at all,” Jim said. “You know, we always taught the boys to help people, especially older people. If you see an older woman or man loading something into their car, you go help them. We taught them that you never know when you’re going to need help.”
Then he caught his breath.
“But, by golly, Jed is just 19,” he said. “We didn’t know he’d need help so soon.”
There has been plenty of it. A supper and dance and auction in Flagler raised about $16,000 for the Michals’ medical bills, only partially covered by insurance.
“And people brought food to the farm since we’ve been in Houston, so Jim wouldn’t have to cook,” said Beverly Michal.
Jed’s best friend, Will Bledsoe, now a student at Colorado State University, has been there too.
“Back in February I told him the cancer had come back and we both cried,” said Michal, who wants to join Bledsoe at CSU in January. “One day down here I woke up from a nap and Will was sitting in a chair next to my bed. It was so nice to see a friend.”
Last Sunday, on a TV monitor, a young man who is planning a future that he isn’t sure he’ll have got to see more friends.
“They all gathered around the movie screen in the gym and had their picture taken with me,” he said of the unusual graduation ceremony. “I could see them all. They said they were thinking of me and praying for me. They said they missed me.
“I told them I missed them too.”
Staff writer Rich Tosches writes each Wednesday and Sunday. He can be reached at rtosches@denverpost.com.
