Nick Kaufman: Cancer Survivor

For Nick Kaufman, fighting Leukemia is a test of mind over matter.

By: Bobby Hart | From the issue: August 2009

Photo: Marshall Franklin Long

Nick Kaufman

The scar on Nick Kaufman’s chest makes it impossible for him to forget a painful time in his young life. It’s where an external IV port connected him to the chemotherapy treatment used to fight the acute myelogenous leukemia (AML) he was diagnosed with nearly a year and a half ago, at just age 13.

After enduring a battle that thoroughly wiped him out for more than five months, it would be easy for the scar to haunt the ninth-grader at Maple Grove Junior High. Yet, Kaufman chooses to look back and smile. “It taught me how much people actually care about me,” he says. “Your attitude is everything. You can do things you don’t even think you can do as long as you have the right attitude.”

Diagnosis

About a month prior to his diagnosis, Kaufman didn’t feel “right.” He was fatigued, he had headaches and bloody noses, and his knees began to ache. “I didn’t really have any clue what it was,” he recalls. “I just felt sick.”

When his health took a turn for the worse in the last week of March 2008 after a trip to Mexico, he went to get tested for a parasite. It came back negative. A week later he went to a pediatrician at Maple Grove Allina to get his blood tested. When the results came back, Kaufman and his family were told to come in to discuss them. “I knew right then it wasn’t going to be good,” Nick’s mother, Sue, recalls.

They were informed that Nick had AML. After asking several questions, Nick was directed to get treated immediately at Children’s Hospital in Minneapolis, where he was told he’d have to receive chemotherapy and should plan to stay in the hospital for about six to seven months. He started his treatment two days after his diagnosis, a rapid response that’s common with AML patients.

AML is a fast-growing cancer of the blood and bone marrow that about one in five children with leukemia has, according to the Leukemia & Lymphoma Society. With this type of cancer, bone marrow makes unformed cells called blasts, which usually develop into white blood cells, red blood cells or platelets. However, AML cells are abnormal, are unable to fight infections like regular white blood cells and can grow quickly to crowd out the normal blood cells a body needs. More than 11,900 new cases of AML occur in the United States each year, mostly in adults, with the average age of diagnosis being 65. Kaufman was a rare case, falling under the 10 percent category of AML patients who are children. Still, one question that never came out of Kaufman’s mouth was “why me?”

That’s what taught Sue how strong her son was. “His motto throughout the treatment was ‘mind over matter,’” she says. “He was going to fight it. He wasn’t going to let it all bring him down. He was determined.”