Helping with a young boy’s fight

Deirdre Newman

At Christmastime, Tony Morrell was given two to four weeks to live. A

month later, the 10-year-old afflicted by brain cancer is still

struggling to survive on multiple fronts -- struggling to breathe,

struggling to swallow, struggling to be normal again.

Tony was diagnosed with brain cancer in August. The cancer has

spread down his brain stem. He is now at home under hospice care.

His parents, Carol Dugan and Bill Morrell, were optimistic about

an experimental cancer treatment in Texas. But the first month of

treatment didn’t work, and Tony is too weak and his cancer too

advanced to try any more, Dugan said.

“It was extra devastating because we had gone through all the

agony of going to Texas and getting him on this brutal treatment,”

Dugan said. “It’s quite a blow. There’s really nothing we can do.”

Tony’s struggle continues to touch the lives of people throughout

the county.

The wait staff at the Red Robin in Orange will give all of the

tips they make from 4 p.m. to close today to the family.

The idea for the fundraiser started with a family friend who used

to work at the restaurant, manager Christina Cable said. The former

employee asked Cable if there was anything the restaurant could do.

After she read a story about Tony in the Daily Pilot and saw the

before and after pictures of Tony, Cable said she was inspired to

organize a fundraiser.

She got approval from the restaurant’s general manager and started

getting the word out to other Red Robins, asking for volunteers.

“This company is a really helpful company, and they really want to

help out,” Cable said.

Even before the event, donations have already started coming in.

By Monday, the restaurant had collected $103.

Tony is still dealing with the disease with the same

imperturbability he always had, his mom said.

“He’s an incredibly strong little boy,” she said. “He never

complains. He still has life goals like walking and swallowing. He

wants to go to school. He just loves to learn.”

He is on oxygen and is being fed through a tube in his stomach.

“It’s kind of one day at a time,” his grandmother Betty Dugan

said. “There were a few days when we thought we were going to lose

him. The last few days, he has felt better and wanted to get up and

go look outside. The next day, he’s back like he was before. So it’s

kind of up and down.”

In the last month, Tony has received support from various sources.

Kaiser Elementary School sent him a laptop with a video feed so he

can watch his fourth-grade class. Teachers and students have come to

visit him and his science teacher communicates with him via the

computer, Dugan said.

“[The computer] has really been very well-received by Tony and his

family -- an opportunity to have more contact with school than they

otherwise would,” Kaiser Principal Stacy Holmes said. “It’s also been

wonderful for the children and the teachers -- who taught him this

year and last year -- to have an opportunity to be in touch and to

share some of the normal kid and teacher things.”

Christ Lutheran Church has been a bedrock of support, with the

pastor coming to see Tony and being there for the whole family, Carol

Dugan said.

“I’ve always been spiritual, but this has drawn me closer to

spirituality and religion,” Carol Dugan said. “I had Tony baptized a

few weeks ago and felt good about that.”

His parents decided to bring him home for the last few weeks of

his life instead of keeping him in the hospital, so he could be in a

familiar setting with his toys close at hand, Carol Dugan said.

“We chose hospice because Tony, being the unique child he is, the

hospital wasn’t the right place,” she said. “He’ll be in [his

bedroom] coughing and gasping for air and then says, ‘Can I play

X-Box?’”

After being in fight mode for so long and buoyed by the hope that

the experimental treatment would be successful, Carol Dugan said, she

has resignedly accepted the inevitable.

“For me, the moment that I finally surrendered and said, ‘I don’t

have any control over it’ and said, ‘he’s going to die,’ is the

moment I [could] first accept it and make every moment a quality

one,” she said. “I don’t cry now every time I’m with him.”

On Monday, as Tony lay in bed, propped up on pillows watching “The

Simpsons” on the TV at the foot of his bed, she comforted him. She

gave him a hug and some kisses and scratched where he had an itch on

his face.

“It’s very painful as a parent to watch your child gasp for air,

try to breathe and choke on his own spit,” Carol Dugan said.

While the hospice service is free, Tony’s parents are struggling

financially with their everyday expenses since they stopped working

to take care of him. The family has collected more than $15,000 so

far, with most it going to Tony’s treatment.

“We’re kind of stuck with our second mortgage on our home and all

sort of medical bills and just trying to make ends meet,” Carol Dugan

said. “It’s really tough.”