Nick Floyd was a regular goofy 14-year-old kid. Although he was fairly shy, he loved to laugh and joke and he had a heart of gold. He loved nature and animals of any kind. Nick was an avid runner and swimmer and his family often volunteered in the ultra running community, Special Olympics and Nick especially loved volunteering for Arizona Game and Fish. Nick’s life drastically changed on October 3
0, 2012. After fighting “growing pains” for a couple of weeks, Nick’s leg suddenly tripled in size, prompting his mom to take him in for an x-ray. That evening, our family heard the word “osteosarcoma” for the first time. Osteosarcoma is a rare form of bone cancer the generally affects teens, younger children and occasionally adults. The best way to describe this type of cancer is this: Pretend you have a glass of milk. The milk is your bone. If you blow air in the milk, you create bubbles (the cancer) or a bogus bone cell. After an MRI further confirmed the diagnosis, the Floyd family was thrown in a world of doctors, nurses and hospitals. A world of chemo, surgery and drugs became the normal. We already ate healthy but turned up the heat to a diet no teenager would ever want. Leaving the house consisted of barf bags, pill bottles and wheelchairs. Nick’s days turned from being in school where he enjoyed being with his peers, to painful days in the hospital with complete strangers asking him thousands of questions. The pain was more than he could handle some days, and as they biopsied the site, walking was no longer an option. Nick initially went through three months of chemo treatments. In those three months, life became extremely trying. We had to take him out of school as he was thrown into a world of hospitals, doctors and nurses, pain, nausea and many other side effects from the horrible amount of toxic waste being put into his body. On February 21, 2013, Nick underwent a surgery that would remove his right knee and lower femur (which contained the grapefruit-sized tumor) and replaced them with prosthetic parts. Remember those “bubbles” in the glass of milk? Well, they were growing in his lungs, which required four lung surgeries (one on the right and three on the left) to try to remove the boney type tumors that developed. In May 2014, we were told our options in Phoenix were running thin and were sent to MD Anderson for a radical and innovative surgery. The doctors planned to remove Nicholas’s left lung and flood his chest cavity where the lung was with chemo. This surgery was extremely dangerous, and may even take his life on the operating table, but Nick wanted to give it all he had. We supported him in this decision. After opening him up and finding tumors covering his rib cage, the doctors closed Nick up, and told us to go home and live life to the fullest. The last four months of Nick’s life were nothing short of a movie. Hawaii, surfing, Randy Johnson and even asking out the crush of his life. Nick left many of us in awe. Nick NEVER gave up, even up until his last breath. It was an honor being his mom, and my hope is to carry on his legacy forever. We are a 501(c)3 organization, dedicated to helping children and families battling against childhood cancer. Our primary purpose is to connect families with children battling cancer with the resources they need to fight the battle of their lives.
