“All he ever worried about was us and the other kids,” Jim says. His dad breaks down in tears thinking about how his son endured it all without a complaint. Taylor spent months in and out of the quarantined loneliness of an isolation room, bombarded by chemotherapy to put his cancer in remission and radiation to kill his bone marrow. She celebrated her 6th birthday in the hospital’s oncology ward. The hospital’s childhood cancer survival rate was one of the two best in the country.Īlyssa came with them, attending a special school for siblings of cancer patients. The Carols left Taylor’s older brother in the care of his grandmother so he could finish his senior year at Dana Hills High and took Taylor to Seattle Children’s Hospital & Regional Medical Center. ![]() So Taylor had two chances for survival: become a pediatric test case for an experimental cocktail mix of drugs or undergo a bone-marrow transplant that could disfigure him or kill him if it didn’t work.Ĭynthia wrote the inventor of one of the drugs that Taylor could get, and asked what he would do if this was his child with this disease. It made his leukemia so powerful chemo alone couldn’t wipe it out. The genetic factor occurs in less than 5 percent of children with ALL. If you don’t get your son into remission quickly, his parents remember being told, Taylor will die.įurther tests on his spinal tap showed Taylor had Philadelphia chromosome-positive ALL, short for acute lymphoblastic leukemia. His white blood cell count was about 25 times what is considered normal. His pediatrician, noting how pale and lethargic Taylor appeared, sent the family to Children’s Hospital of Orange County. Taylor also had bruises that weren’t healing. ![]() He soon landed a paid role in “Tosca,” produced by the now-defunct Opera Pacific.īetween sports and performing, Taylor was quite the sensation.īut night sweats and fatigue troubled him after he finished playing Tevye in a school production of “Fiddler on the Roof.” His parents thought he was worn out from stress and the long rehearsals. Lessons with opera coach Kathleen Martin followed. They attended an encore performance the next day and joined in on the standing ovation for Taylor. Jim and Cynthia got a call from the school. He secretly sang in his closet at home but never in public. Anne School in Dana Point, Taylor had to don a coonskin cap and perform a number about moving west to California. ![]() And sang.ĭrafted against his wishes for a fourth-grade play at St. Cynthia, a nurse, became a soccer mom.Īn all-star athlete, Taylor played football and baseball. ![]() Jim, who owned a successful software company, coached youth baseball. The children were healthy and into sports. “It was something he wanted me to have to see what I needed to work on when I was older and just see what kind of a person I could be.”Ī pitch that struck the left-handed-hitting Taylor at a youth league game in May 2006 fractured his right elbow.īefore that ball was thrown, his family – parents, Jim and Cynthia Carol older brother, Brandon and younger sister, Alyssa – lived a normal suburban life in south Orange County. “I didn’t understand why things were happening and why innocent children much stronger than me would die,” he says of the thoughts that kept him company as he fought his illness in a hospital isolation ward far from home. He is convinced everything that happened to him as a child happened for a reason – to wed his love for music with philanthropy so he can help sick children get better.
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