Ill 4-year-old gets ‘talking’ bear as gift from Brownville auxiliary

BRADFORD – Sometime between now and July 9, Mitchell Smith will celebrate his fifth birthday, marking another milestone in his life, but one that will be bittersweet.

Along with the laughter, cake and balloons to be shared by the blond-haired, blue-eyed boy and his loved ones, there will be tears.

The cherub-faced toddler has cancer of the central nervous system, and his prognosis is grim.

“We have been told that there’s nothing more he could do [for treatment],” his mother Julie Smith of Bradford said during a recent interview.

Doctors have given him just weeks to live, she said.

Even though he has suffered with health problems since August 2002, Mitchell has been a trouper, according to Julie Smith and his father, Mike Smith. The little boy enjoys playing with puzzles and trucks with his siblings, Michelle, 11, Michael, 8, and Jordan, 7, and he finds comfort snuggling with his parents under the covers of their bed.

But lately, he has become mellower and has resorted to sucking on his fingers, according to his mother.

Those fingers went into his mouth recently when the Brownville Junction American Legion Auxiliary presented Mitchell with a Spinoza bear with nine audio tapes designed for children in crisis.

The toy bear, designed to be a companion to critically ill children, has a tape recorder inside it that plays messages of positive reinforcement.

Handed the bear, Mitchell grabbed it, started playing with its buttons and wouldn’t let it go.

Perched on his father’s lap during the short ceremony at the Legion Hall, the little boy looked back at one point and whispered, “That’s not a real bear.”

His father, drawing his son closer to his chest, replied that he was only fooling when he told him earlier that the bear was real.

It was a father-and-son moment, one that Mike Smith will cherish forever.

If there is anything Smith has learned, it’s to savor every minute. The self-employed woodsman said people “should not dwell in the future, but stay in the here and now.” That has been a hard lesson for him and his wife to learn over the years, he said.

The Smiths realized something was wrong with their son when Mitchell began throwing up in August 2002. He would vomit and then be fine for a few days before another bout of nausea struck, Julie Smith said. When he started to limp, both immediately thought brain tumor, she said.

“It was just instinct,” she explained. Their instinct proved correct when a CAT scan confirmed Mitchell had a brain tumor.

Surgery was scheduled immediately at Children’s Hospital in Boston, and the tumor was removed. Everything appeared to be normal until September 2003 when another small tumor was discovered on Mitchell’s spine. That tumor also was successfully removed.

Because of the distance between the two tumors, physicians worried about residual cells in his small body, so they started him on oral chemotherapy.

“He tolerated [the chemotherapy] well,” his mother said. But a couple of weeks into the chemotherapy, two tumors were discovered in Mitchell’s brain. Although he continued with the chemotherapy, by March one of the tumors had grown to the size of a golf ball.

Since the type of tumor Mitchell had did not respond well to chemotherapy, the little boy stopped taking the drugs. There was little else to rely on other than clinical trials of new medicines.

“They didn’t give us much hope,” Julie Smith said, but it was worth a try. That too had to be discontinued because Mitchell became so ill.

Today Mitchell takes steroids to help reduce the pressure on his brain and appears to be a normal, yet bashful, youngster. Looks, however, are deceiving.

“It definitely gives you a new perspective on life,” Julie Smith said. Like her husband, she said she plans to enjoy every day with their son and celebrate the years they have shared, even if it means moving his birthday up a few days.