Kathy Emerson is mindful of her blessings, not only on this day of giving thanks.

When she thinks about what might have been, the Columbia Falls mother is infinitely grateful her oldest son, Alex Hanson, survived not one but two extreme battles with cancer and overcame a rare flesh-eating infection that nearly claimed his life 11 years ago.

Doctors marveled at the boy’s recovery after he lived through the first round of disease and the near-fatal infection. Two years later, Alex came down with a type of non-Hodgkins lymphoma. He battled that cancer into remission, too.

In the medical world, he has been called an anomaly more than once.

“I’ve always said he’s destined for great things,” Emerson said.

The arduous journey of surviving two cancers seems like ancient history to both of them now, though the effects of the cancers still linger in Alex’s body.

In many ways the ordeal charted different lives for both of them.

After working closely with several nurses during Alex’s struggles, Emerson, 46, developed a passion for nursing and began chipping away at college courses. It has taken six years to complete her degree, and she will graduate Dec. 14 with a Bachelor of Science degree in nursing from Montana State University.

Alex, now 24, has found his passion, too, studying culinary arts at Flathead Valley Community College. He hopes to one day open his own restaurant.

Emerson and her son smile and a knowing look passes between them as they consider their lives. They both know the outcome could have been very different.

‘He’s a fighter’

The Daily Inter Lake first wrote about Alex when he was just 12 and a sixth-grader at Columbia Falls Junior High School. It all started quite subtly.

Alex felt body aches that his parents dismissed as growing pains. He felt “weird” and wasn’t sleeping well. About a week before he was diagnosed with acute myelogenous leukemia — one of the most severe forms of the disease — Alex developed an unusual skin infection on his back.

Emerson remembers wondering if he had mono.

A few days after Alex began chemotherapy treatment at Children’s Hospital in Seattle, he contracted a flesh-eating bacterial infection. Doctors braced his parents for the worst, saying he might only live 12 hours.

During seven surgeries between February and September 2002, doctors removed massive amounts of tissue in Alex’s body, including a soccer ball-sized lump in his chest, to fight the flesh-eating infection.

In the middle of all that, Alex had a cord-blood transplant that his body tried to reject for five years. The immunosuppressed boy faced a new crisis in 2004 when he came down with a second cancer, malt B-cell lymphoma, a type of non-Hodgkins lymphoma that’s almost always found in elderly people.

Flabbergasted doctors told Emerson that Alex was the first child they had seen with that kind of cancer.

“We’ve never had this here before,” they told her.

“It took him down pretty hard,” Emerson said about the second cancer. “He could only do half of the chemotherapy because of the cord-blood transplant.”

Alex was frustrated and angry at his medical misfortune, but he always rallied with an indomitable spirit.

“He’s a fighter,” his mother said. “He’s pretty resilient.”

They credit Dr. Jay Erickson of Whitefish for his role in Alex’s treatment.

“He managed Alex’s care so that we could stay home as much as possible,” Emerson said. That included keeping the Seattle Children’s Hospital, the Seattle Cancer Care Alliance and the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center all in the loop.

Passion for cooking

Alex was confined to a wheelchair for a couple of years after the huge doses of steroids he was required to take “destroyed” his hips. The steroids caused avascular necrosis or bone death.

His knees healed on their own after holes were drilled in the bones to reboot the vascular system but his hips were shot and both were replaced.

“My knees still hurt. I have a stress fracture in my shoulder,” he said nonchalantly. “I have back problems, fatigue. I don’t have the stamina most people do.”

But when he begins to talk about being part of the culinary-arts program at FVCC, his eyes light up. Alex’s passion for cooking started at a young age, partly because his mother insisted that Alex and his brother Jordan learn how to fend for themselves in the kitchen.

“I always made the boys cook,” she said.

Alex didn’t immediately delve into culinary arts after graduating from Columbia Falls High School in 2008. Once his health permitted it, he started taking graphic design classes at FVCC, and after his hip replacements he headed to the Seattle Art Institute for a year.

The art institute wasn’t a good fit for him, he said, but two good things came out of his time in Seattle.

“One, I realized I have more physical endurance than I thought,” he said. “And two, I got a girlfriend.”

It was his homemade enchiladas that helped win her heart, he confided.

Also, Emerson added, his girlfriend sees Alex’s scars as a “testament to everything he’s overcome,” and that does a mother’s heart good.

Letting her son go to Seattle on his own wasn’t easy, but a couple of his former nurses mothered and kept watch over him.

Eyes on the future

These days Alex clearly has his eyes on the future. He plans to move back to Seattle after completing the 18-month culinary arts program at FVCC. “I thrive there,” he said.

He hopes to take an entrepreneur training course in Seattle that will help him launch his career.

Alex continues to have an unbreakable spirit and has always been able to somehow put things in perspective. Recently he told his mother: “If I hadn’t had cancer, I wouldn’t have so many good friends.”

Being a “cancer mom” for 11 years has had its ups and downs for Emerson, but in the end the experience led her to a new career in nursing.

The learning curve was steep when Alex was first diagnosed with leukemia. She remembers reluctantly attending a class to learn how to place and care for the central venous catheter line he had to have.

“I told them [the hospital staff], ‘You’re going to do that,’ and they said, ‘No, you’re going to take this kid home. You need to know how to do this,’” she recalled. “I cried through the entire class as I realized the hugeness of it all.”

Emerson had intended to be a computer programmer after high school — “I was great at it,” she said — but one day she realized “how much I disliked computers.”

She’s really a people person, not a computer person, she said.

Emerson worked at a title company for 18 years, and as she became more familiar with nursing procedures during Alex’s extended treatment, she became intrigued with nursing.

After her first marriage ended, she married Dennis Emerson in 2005. He has four grown children of his own, and with her three children — Alex, Jordan and Megann Hanson — they have become one big blended family.

When Emerson decided to go back to school during the recession, the only way to accommodate it was to move in with her parents, Matt and Judy Mathews. Their home was expanded; Emerson jokingly calls it “the compound.”

With her husband’s support, she enrolled at FVCC part time, taking courses to transfer to the four-year registered nursing program offered through Montana State University.

For the past six years, Emerson has worked as a certified nurse’s aide at North Valley Hospital, where she found a supportive environment as she juggled home, work, school and community volunteer work with Relay for Life and Shepherd’s Hand Clinic.

‘They’ve

nurtured me’

“They’ve nurtured me,” she said. “Someone is always saying, ‘Come with me, I want to show you this.’ We’re always learning. They pick my brains about stuff.”

The hospital staff has been waiting for her to graduate. She has been promised a job in nursing.

“Alex started his trauma at North Valley and they became family,” she added.

Her dream job is to one day work at the Children’s Hospital in Seattle, “if God’s plan is for me to go there.

“Right now my commitment is here,” she said.

During those long periods of waiting, watching and worrying as Alex was hospitalized in Seattle, the doctors realized Emerson had a gift for comforting other mothers whose children weren’t going to survive.

“The doctors picked me to talk to those moms to help them say goodbye,” she said. “You need to make that [hospice experience] wonderful for people.”

As for reconciling her own feelings when Alex was at death’s doorstep, she never gave in to fear.

“I never went there with Alex,” she said. “I never wavered.”

Features editor Lynnette Hintze may be reached at 758-4421 or by email at [email protected].