Boy Defies Cancer Odds Multiple Times
Seven-year-old Jake Paternoster has battled cancer several times.
Dec. 2, 2007 — -- For more than a year, seven-year-old Jake Paternoster has battled cancer. Despite its recurrence several times, he continues to defy the odds.
"Fight, get through it and that's that," he said of his illness.
Jake, from Doylestown, Pa., first began exhibiting troubling signs as a five-year-old, according to his parents.
Jake was sleeping a lot, and had little appetite and constant headaches. He even showed little interest in the toys he received.
But it was one disturbing moment, when Jake's mother watched as he was unable to feed himself peaches, that forced her to look for a source of his problems.
"I brought it over to him, and we were sitting right there on the couch," said Ruth Paternoster. "I noticed he had a cup in his hand and spoon. And he couldn't coordinate it. And I'm online and I'm putting in every symptom that I could remember seeing in him, and everything that came up would be brain tumor."
Doctors confirmed Jake did have brain tumor and the diagnosis was grim.
"This tumor was massive and is larger than they had originally thought," Ruth Paternoster said.
Doctors decided they had to operate immediately on the tumor covering the entire left side of Jake's brain.
The operation was eight hours long, but doctors said they didn't expect the child to walk again without the aid of a cane -- or worse, he possibly could be paralyzed on his body's entire right side.
However, Jake had plans of his own. After weeks of difficult rehabilitation, Jake did walk again.
"He worked hard, and now he walked," Ruth said. "He's doing things they said he would never do."
But the family's excitement soon turned dim in March when two more tumors surfaced, in addition to the first one.
"The MRI shows there's a third tumor. We took out the two, and now, there's a third," Ruth said.
Within 24 hours, Jake had two brain surgeries.
"I said, 'You beat it the first time, and you'll beat it again,'" said Michael Paternoster, Jake's father.
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