A Year After ALL Diagnosis, Zachary Pollock Joined

A Tommy Fund Celebration With Friends And Family

By Shannon Hicks

Zachary Pollock was joined by 36 family members and friends last month for The 2006 Tommy Fund Family Day held at Connecticut Tennis Center in New Haven. Held in part to honor Childhood Cancer Awareness Month and also as a benefit event for The Tommy Fund for Childhood Cancer at Yale-New Haven Hospital, the afternoon offers participants a 5-kilometer “Run For The Kids” road race, a two-mile “Stroll For The Kids,” and a 0.3-mile Fun Run, and plenty of family-oriented activities once those competitions are completed.

The Sandy Hook youngster, who is a fifth grader at Reed School, was also there to see what it would feel like to be surrounded by people wearing a T-shirt printed with one of his drawings. The 10-year-old had been picked by staff at Yale-New Haven Children’s Hospital to come up with the design for T-shirts that were given out to the first 800 people to sign up for Family Day.

Zach is also a patient of the children’s hospital. He was diagnosed with an aggressive form of blood cancer called T-cell acute lymphocytic leukemia (ALL) on September 28, 2005, but is now in remission. Now considered in long-term maintenance, Zach has daily chemotherapy at home and returns every other week to the hospital for supplemental treatment.

Zach’s treatment lowers his immune levels and can make him tired, but once he regains his strength he loves to play soccer and ride his bike. He also loves, his mom will tell you, to play video games.

“There are only a few things I really can’t do,” he said. “I can’t do anything too germy — I can’t touch elevator buttons — but I can be physical most of the time.”

In was during one of his visits to the hospital in April that Zach was invited to do the drawing for Tommy Fund Family Day. While Zach happens to enjoy drawing, he said recently that he did not know how the Tommy Fund people knew that.

He was happy to be given the opportunity of designing the Family Fun Day shirt, he said, but also found it very challenging. It was not until he visited The Hole in The Wall Gang Camp (where he also spent a week this past summer) that he was given some motivation.

“I really didn’t know what to draw,” he said. “My idea finally came from a tour of a camp when I met an artist, Kevin, who challenged me when he said ‘What do you like?’

“When I told him I like monkeys, he told me to use that as my idea,” Zach said. When he was 4 years old, Zach and his family were on a cruise and his parents bought him a monkey doll. Named Bobby, that stuffed animal is now one of Zach’s favorite possessions and it was the source of his inspiration.

The drawing depicts a monkey hanging from a tree branch by its tail, a ladybug on the branch and a pair of butterflies nearby. The monkey is holding a banana that says “Good Times” — a phrase that has been Zach’s expression of choice during the past year. It is the phrase he utters on good days and bad, like when steroids puffed him up or he lost weight from vomiting, when he had an anaphylactic reaction for chemo, during any of the four hospital stays for fevers, or when he would find himself sitting for countless hours at Yale.

It has been a long year. The Pollock family needed to take time for themselves, and Family Day provided just that opportunity.

“It was really kind of a carnival atmosphere, even with all the doctors and oncologists around,” Lisa Pollock, Zach’s mother, said a few days after the event. “It was a fun day.”

“It was fun,” agreed Zach, who started a conga line at one point that “got huge” and snaked its way around the tennis center.

Zach Power Team consisted of 37 people, ranging from age 2 to 90 years old, and some of the team members finished the fun run at the top of their divisions.

Zach participated in the kids’ walk after deciding he was not up for the Fun Run that morning. He was right in the thick of things for much of the activity, however, from holding the American flag during for the national anthem before the start of the road race to being at the awards table to hand out many of the awards, not only to his teammates but also to the runners of all ages.

“It was nice to see the [hospital] staff in a casual, nonmedical environment with no talking about cancer,” Lisa Pollock posted on her blog. “It was definitely a bittersweet and emotional day for us.”

Of seeing her son hold the flag during the national anthem, Mrs Pollock wrote, “We were so proud to have him standing there and at the same time so sad that he even had a reason to be in such an event. It is our new reality so on we go.”

The Tommy Fund’s mission is simple: “To provide emotional, educational, medical and recreational support to children with cancer and their families, and to improve the cure rate of childhood cancer through the Yale-New Haven Children’s Hospital and the Yale University School of Medicine.”